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this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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Actually yes, those companies are cult like.
My stepdad worked for Wise potato chips back in the 90s. One year for Christmas I got a case of salt and vinegar potato chips. I fucking hate salt and vinegar chips.
Waaaaaahhhhh
I can't really speak to the specific culture of these companies but it's often a good product development choice to require employees to interact with, use, or drink whatever your product is.
Its called "dogfooding". The idea is that it gets problems with the products fixed because the people making the product have a vested interest in improving what they use everyday.
Can't speak to whether that's why it's happening in these cases though, or what the culture around it is like (ie if it's cultlike). I just saw an opportunity to share something I find interesting and wanted to take it 🤷♂️
I think it can also be informative when staff is choosing the competition.
If the business understands why those products are successful at solving whatever problem the staff is trying to solve, it may help management see either how they've misdefined the problem or screwed up the solution.
Both are probably good - eat your own dogfood and the competitor's too, haha.
Thats a very fair point!
I hadn't thought about it that way, it makes sense from that angle
Edit: I'm reminded of when I had a friend who was a waiter in a high end restaurant, and the staff got free meals (and were apparently super essential in testing out new menu items)