New Coke, Cheetos lip balm among 50 all-time worst product flops

Michael B. Sauter, Evan Comen, Thomas C. Frohlich and Samuel Stebbins

24/7 Wall Street

Google+ finally ceased operations in April after eight years of efforts to boost interest in the struggling social network. The long-anticipated shutdown represents just the latest major Google product to fail to live up to its promise.

Google has gained notoriety for scuttling dozens of projects, but just like success, failure is part of doing business. Entrepreneurs and large companies often take on big risks, hoping for success but not always finding it.

These failures can take many different forms. Often, a product simply does not connect with consumers and does not sell. In other cases, it may not come close to meeting a company’s expectations or plans, or it is recalled or discontinued for some flaws. These can all be marked as failures. While failures are expected, some can be so catastrophic they can lead to permanent damage to a company’s reputation, layoffs, and even complete financial ruin.

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Sometimes, it can take years or even decades for a product flop to disappear from the market. This was the case with Betamax, a video format that Sony introduced with the expectation it would replace VHS. Despite being technologically superior to VHS, Betamax lost market share until it eventually vanished.

Some of the products on this list were among the most highly anticipated products of the year, and when released, they were the biggest product launches of the year – that is, before failing.

24/7 Wall St. reviewed some of the greatest product launch blunders throughout history. Today, these product flops exist as case studies companies use to avoid future failure. They range from Ford’s Edsel in 1958 to 2016’s Galaxy Note 7. Many of these products led to losses in the hundreds of millions, and sometimes billions, of dollars. In tech, film, the internet, the pharmaceutical industry, and more, these are the biggest product flops of all time.

1. Google Glass

• Company: Google

• Year introduced: 2013

• What it was: Wearable technology

Google first announced Google Glass – an eyeglasses-shaped head-mounted display with smartphone capabilities – to the public in 2012. The announcement began with a statement of principle: “We think technology should work for you – to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.” After two years of disappointing sales, it was clear consumers did not need Google Glass. Google stuck to its principle, and in 2015 discontinued the product’s development. Privacy concerns, reported bugs, low battery life, bans from public spaces, and an inability to live up to the hype all stymied public adoption of the technology.

2. The Newton

• Company: Apple

• Year introduced: 1993

• What it was: Personal digital assistant

While the personal digital assistant would become a popular consumer electronics product in the late 1990s, the first PDA was one of the biggest product flops of all time. One year after Apple CEO John Sculley coined the term “PDA” in 1992, the company released the Newton MessagePad. While the device incorporated innovative technology such as a pen-based touch screen and the ability to sync with software on a personal computer, Apple sold only 50,000 units of the product in its first four months on the market. The Newton product line was discontinued in 1998.

3. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

• Company: Atari

• Year introduced: 1982

• What it was: Video game

Several video games have failed over the years, but arguably none as spectacularly as "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial." The video game was developed shortly after the release of Steven Spielberg’s classic film. With only five weeks spent in development – games typically take months, if not years, to program – the game was notoriously difficult and sold miserably. Atari spent $21 million to purchase the rights to the franchise and $5 million on promotion of the game. The company made 4 million copies of the game, but sold only 1.5 million. Atari buried the leftover copies in a landfill.

4. Satisfries

• Company: Burger King

• Year introduced: 2013

• What it was: French fries

In 2013, Burger King introduced a new menu item advertised as a healthy alternative to their traditional french fries. Satisfries used a less porous batter, which caused the fry to absorb less oil than regular fries during cooking. While Satisfries were made with a healthier recipe, Burger King failed to convey the difference to customers. The fries were also more expensive than Burger King’s regular french fries, and failed to gain traction with consumers. The company discontinued the fries in 2014, less than a year after they were introduced.

5. Premier smokeless cigarettes

• Company: RJ Reynolds

• Year introduced: 1988

• What it was: Cigarette

R.J. Reynolds, the second largest U.S. tobacco company, began marketing in 1988 a smokeless tobacco product that was intended to be a safer way to use a cigarette. In addition to concerns over the product's actual safety, smokers missed the familiar elements of traditional cigarettes – the smoke, the burn, and the flick. Another issue was the widely-reported unpleasant chemical taste, which one user described as resembling “burning plastic.” Reynolds sunk close to $1 billion into the product before pulling it off the market within a year.

6. Cheetos Lip Balm

• Company: Frito-Lay

• Year introduced: 2005

• What it was: Lip balm

Popular lip balm brands such as Chapstick, Blistex, and Burt’s Bees, have successfully sold their products to Americans for decades. Many prefer such flavored varieties as cherry, mint, and vanilla bean. Not every popular flavor can be successfully turned into a lip balm, however, a lesson PepsiCo subsidiary Frito-Lay learned the hard way in 2005. While Cheetos has been a popular snack for more than six decades, Cheetos-flavored lip balm failed to catch on with consumers.

7. Terra Nova

• Company: Fox

• Year introduced: 2011

• What it was: TV show

Every year, TV shows are cancelled before the end of their first season. While Terra Nova, which aired for one 13-episode season, is not unusual in this regard, it may go down as the most costly cancelled television show of all time. Documenting the time-traveling adventures of a 22nd century family fleeing a dystopian society for a prehistoric past, the pilot of the show alone cost Fox between $16 and $20 million to make. Terra Nova encountered numerous production mishaps while filming in Australia, including a flood that nearly killed a crew member. Ratings failed to meet expectations, and the show was not renewed for a second season. Fox is estimated to have spent more than $50 million on the failed show, not including marketing costs.

8. Touch of Yogurt shampoo

• Company: Clairol

• Year introduced: 1979

• What it was: Shampoo

In keeping with the 1970s trend of incorporating natural food ingredients like lemon, herbs, and honey into beauty and hygiene products, Clairol – at the time a subsidiary of Bristol-Myers Squibb – thought a yogurt shampoo was just what the American consumer wanted. It turned out the company had grossly miscalculated. Many consumers were apparently confused as to what they had bought, as there were reported cases of people eating the shampoo.

9. New Coke

• Company: Coca-Cola

• Year introduced: 1985

• What it was: Soft drink

Over the 15 years leading up to 1985, Coca-Cola’s flagship cola drink had been losing market share to Pepsi Cola. To compete, the company changed the drink’s formula for the first time in 99 years – but the move today is considered one of the greatest flops of all time. New Coke was met with public outrage and lasted only a few months. The company reintroduced its older formula, rebranded as Coca-Cola Classic.

10. Windows Vista

• Company: Microsoft

• Year introduced: 2007

• What it was: Operating system

Introduced in 2007 as a follow-up to Windows XP, the Windows Vista operating system was everything its popular predecessor was not – in all the wrong ways. Panned by customers and IT professionals alike, Vista reduced PC performance and caused a number of internet problems for users. As a result, Dell began offering Windows XP again on new laptops a few short months after Vista was introduced. Windows announced this month that it would no longer provide support for Vista, driving the final nail into the operating system’s coffin.

11. Kitchen Entrees

• Company: Colgate

• Year introduced: 1982

• What it was: Frozen meal

Many of the worst product flops in recent memory were caused by otherwise popular brands wandering too far outside of their area of expertise. Colgate Kitchen Entrees may be the best example of such a product failure. When it came to pre-prepared frozen meals, Americans had plenty of options in the 1980s. Perhaps because consumers naturally associated the Colgate name with toothpaste, there was never much of an appetite for pre-made meals bearing the Colgate logo.

12. Coors Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water

• Company: Coors

• Year introduced: 1990

• What it was: Sparkling water

Coors and Coors Light are two of the most popular beers in the United States. Introducing Coors Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water to the public in 1990, the Coors Brewing Company also sought to capitalize on the fast-growing bottled water segment in the United States. The water was Coors' first non-alcoholic product since Prohibition. The Coors brand name did not help to sell the product, however, as the beer-name branding may have confused or even frightened consumers. Coors let its trademark of Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water expire in 1997.

13. Harley-Davidson perfume

• Company: Harley-Davidson

• Year released: 1994

• What it was: Perfume

Harley-Davidson is one of the most iconic and valuable brands in the world. It is also one of the more masculine brands. The company has not deviated considerably from this fact, although it has tried. The company released Legendary Harley-Davidson, a cologne for men, among several other varieties, starting in 1994. Another perfume, Black Fire, hit the market as recently as 2005. All are now discontinued. In the 1990s, the company released a number of other products, including wine coolers and aftershave, which after failing miserably have also become classic cases of brand overextension.

14. Persil Power

• Holding company: Unilever

• Year released: 1994

• What it was: Stain remover

Unilever introduced Persil Power detergent to the market in 1994. The product utilized a newly patented stain removal formula called Accelerator. The company was so confident in the Accelerator catalyst that it carried out its $300 million introduction of Persil Power without any formal test marketing. Over time, it became clear the detergent was damaging clothes at high temperatures. After nine months on the shelves, the company replaced Persil Power with Persil New Generation, a detergent without the Accelerator compound.

15. Cosmopolitan yogurt

• Company: Cosmopolitan

• Year introduced: 1999

• What it was: Yogurt

Cosmopolitan is a popular women’s magazine, full of fashion advice, dating tips, celebrity gossip, and horoscopes. What the magazine’s leadership was thinking when they expanded the brand’s reach from the magazine aisle to the dairy aisle remains a mystery. Few will likely remember the 1999 debut of Cosmopolitan’s yogurt line, as the short-lived product was only available for 18 months. Like many other products on this list, Cosmopolitan yogurt was a case of a brand reaching too far beyond its area of expertise.

16. DH 106 Comet

• Company: De Havilland

• Year introduced: 1949

• What it was: Airplane

We now take jet travel for granted, but the development of a commercially viable jetliner involved a great deal of trial, error, and some utter failures. De Havilland, a British aircraft manufacturer, developed the Comet, the first commercial jet airliner. Unfortunately, within a few years of its 1949 debut, the Comet encountered several unexplained fatal crashes, including planes overrunning the runway and one exploding in midair. The Comet's reputation plummeted, and while De Havilland scrambled to redesign the plane, American companies Douglas and Boeing took over the industry.

17. DeLorean DMC-12

• Company: Delorean Motor Company

• Year introduced: 1981

• What it was: Sports car

In 1973, auto executive John DeLorean left General Motors to form the DeLorean Motor Company. After years of production delays, the DeLorean DMC-12 was released in January 1981. The car’s unique design was poorly received, however, and by 1982 less than half of the 7,000 DeLorean units produced had been sold. The DeLorean is widely recognized due to its use as a converted time machine in the “Back to the Future” series. However, the first of these films was released in 1985, far too late to save the ill-fated brand. DeLorean filed for bankruptcy in 1982.

18. EZ Squirt

• Company: Heinz

• Year released: 2000

• Company revenue when released: Ketchup

Before EZ Squirt, ketchup was always varying shades of red. To cater to kids, who were – and still are – among ketchup’s largest groups of consumers, Heinz began producing purple, green, and blue EZ Squirt ketchup in matching, vibrantly colored squeeze bottles. At first, the colorful ketchup was a huge success. The novelty wore off quickly, however, and not long after its introduction, sales of EZ Squirt began to decline. In January 2006, less than six years after its debut, Heinz halted production of the product.

19. United States Football League

• Company: USFL

• Year introduced: 1982

• What it was: Sports league

Conceived as a way to satiate America's appetite for football in the spring and summer months, the United States Football League was introduced in 1982. The league originally consisted of 12 teams, one of which, the New Jersey Generals, was owned by President Donald Trump. The league was beset with problems, not the least of which was finding stadiums to play in. Ultimately, over half a dozen teams folded when the league’s brain trust decided to compete directly with the NFL by scheduling games in the fall. By 1985, the league was finished.

20. Home

• Company: Facebook

• Year introduced: 2013

• What it was: Mobile phone app

With rising mobile phone use and social media engagement, Facebook in 2013 decided to launch a family of apps that combine these trends. Facebook Home converts the home screen of a smartphone into the Facebook news feed. While most of Facebook’s over 1 billion users log in to their accounts on a smartphone, the social media giant’s new product never caught on. Early users cited clunky operation, the inability to toggle between Facebook Home and the original phone interface, and lack of options for customization, among other snags.

21. Edsel

• Company: Ford

• Year introduced: 1957

• What it was: Car

Ford spent a year aggressively marketing the Edsel – named after Henry Ford’s son – ahead of its 1957 release. It was to be the “car of the future,” made available on dealership lots on what Ford dubbed “E-Day." Despite the hype, the car was a commercial disaster. It was considerably overpriced, disappointingly not futuristic, and generally ugly. Ford ceased the car's production after only two years, losing an estimated $350 million.

22. Friendster

• Company: Friendster

• Year introduced: 2002

• What it was: Social media site

Social media site Facebook is one of the biggest corporate success stories in recent memory. Unfortunately, when it comes to social media, for every success story there is at least one flop – as in the case of Friendster. The site’s users suffered through slow page loading times and the company’s developers failed to scale up when the number of subscribers spiked. Ultimately, competitors such as Facebook provided a much better user experience. Introduced in 2002, Friendster discontinued its services in mid-2015.

23. WOW! Chips

• Company: Frito-Lay

• Year introduced: 1998

• What it was: Snack

PepsiCo subsidiary Frito-Lay introduced its line of WOW! Chips in 1998. The chips, which were made with the fat substitute olestra, were marketed as a healthy snacking alternative. While WOW! Chips were an initial success with $347 million in sales in their first year – the most of any new product in 1998 – sales slowed when the unpleasant side effects of olestra, such as diarrhea and cramps, became better known. To add to the product’s problems, the Food and Drug Administration instituted labeling requirements for all products containing olestra to carry warnings of “abdominal cramping and loose stools," and by 2000, sales of WOW! Chips were roughly 60% of what they were in the year of their release.

24. Zune

• Company: Microsoft

• Year introduced: 2006

• What it was: MP3 player

In an attempt to compete with Apple's dominant iPod MP3 player, Microsoft released the Zune in 2006. As of November 15, 2015, Microsoft discontinued all streaming, downloading, and other music services for the Zune. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, Microsoft recorded a 42% decline in revenue in its non-gaming devices segment – a decline largely attributable to the Zune’s poor performance. While the device might have been a reasonable choice for consumers, a number of reported bugs did not help sales. On December 31, 2008, most if not all 30GB Zunes stopped functioning simply because the underlying code had failed to account for the extra day in leap years.

25. Relenza

• Company: GlaxoSmithKline

• Year introduced: 1999

• What it was: Influenza pandemic drug

In 1999, a flu pandemic fear caused by the spread of avian flu created demand for antiviral medications. The FDA approved two flu drugs during the pandemic – Tamiflu and Relenza. The former went on to report massive sales, while the latter became one of the worst product flops in the pharmaceutical industry. The powder form of the drug caused respiratory problems in some patients and was only approved as a treatment for influenza rather than a preventative measure. GlaxoSmithKline sold just $13 million worth of the drug in the first quarter of 2006. By comparison, Roche reported $770 million in Tamiflu sales in the first half of the year.

26. Google+

• Company: Google

• Year introduced: 2011

• What it was: Social media site

No all product flops are necessarily discontinued. Sometimes, despite failing to live up to company expectations, they linger. Such was the case with Google+, the social media platform the Silicon Valley giant launched in 2011 to compete with Facebook. However, even with a monumental marketing campaign, Google+ failed to distinguish itself from Facebook and never took off in the same manner. While the site experienced an initial surge in subscribers, by April 2015, Google+ had experienced a 98% decline in user engagement. In April 2019 Google+ was shut down for good.

27. HP Touchpad

• Company: Hewlett-Packard

• Year introduced: 2011

• What it was: Tablet computer

The TouchPad was Hewlett Packard’s attempt to compete with Apple’s wildly successful iPad. Hewlett Packard unveiled the device in the middle of 2011 with an extremely costly advertising campaign. The rollout incorporated numerous celebrity contracts. By late summer, however, box stores such as Best Buy were sitting on excess inventory, and HP began offering steep discounts. Many discounted TouchPads were sold at a loss, and it is estimated the company lost hundreds of millions on the product in all.

28. Kellogg's Breakfast Mates

• Company: Kellogg's

• Year introduced: 1998

• What it was: Breakfast food

In 1998, Kellogg’s introduced Breakfast Mates, an all-in-one package containing a serving of cereal, a small carton of milk, and a plastic spoon. The product was designed as a time saver that would appeal to busy families with two working parents. The stated convenience of the all-in-one packaging did little to save time, largely because traditional cereal is already relatively convenient to consume. In a controlled test reported by The New York Times, preparing a bowl of cereal the traditional way took only one second longer than preparing a bowl of Breakfast Mates. To make matters worse, the product’s $30 million ad campaign sent a mixed message, depicting a family eating the supposedly portable cereal around the kitchen table. In August 1999, Kellogg’s announced Breakfast Mates would be discontinued due to low sales.

29. Maxwell House Brewed Coffee

• Company: Maxwell House

• Year introduced: 1990

• What it was: Coffee

Maxwell House Brewed Coffee was pre-brewed coffee sold in a carton with a picture of a hot mug of coffee on the packaging, a misleading visual cue for a product meant to be stored in the refrigerator. Adding to the product’s issues, the carton was lined with foil and could not be microwaved. For a product marketed for its convenience, this was an especially problematic feature for consumers. The product was discontinued shortly after it was released.

30. Arch Deluxe

• Company: McDonald's

• Year introduced: 1996

• What it was: Hamburger

McDonald’s introduced several failed products throughout its 60-year history, but none so monumental as the Arch Deluxe. Introduced in 1996, the Arch Deluxe was marketed as a more gastronomic hamburger with “a grown-up taste." One commercial featured a child unable to enjoy the sophisticated burger, stripping its toppings to satisfy his unrefined palate. The Arch Deluxe’s advertising budget was an estimated $200 million, the most of any fast food product at the time. However, the approach failed and sales of the Arch Deluxe missed the $1 billion expectation set for its first year. The Arch Deluxe was eventually discontinued.

31. HD DVD

• Company: Toshiba

• Year introduced: 2006

• What it was: Media storage/playback device

The Blu-ray Disc’s succession of the DVD was not preordained. Before Blu-ray was the dominant medium for video playback, it was competing with Toshiba’s HD DVD. Essentially the same product, HD DVD was effectively taken out to pasture when in January 2008, Warner Bros. announced it would only support Sony’s Blu-ray format. Toshiba was not the only loser in the battle against Blu-ray. Millions of Americans found themselves stuck with HD DVD players and laptops after the dust settled.

32. Microsoft Bob

• Company: Microsoft

• Year introduced: 1995

• What it was: User interface

Microsoft released Microsoft Bob in March 1995. Intended as a simple, easy-to-use OS interface at the time, Bob presented the desktop as a house, with familiar objects corresponding with different computer applications. Clicking on the stationary lying on a desk, for example, opened the word processor. Despite its simple appearance, Bob required more processing power than most home computers had in 1995. Bob was also considered too expensive and poorly designed, and was overshadowed by the release of Windows 95 later that year. Bob was discontinued roughly a year after its release.

33. 47 Ronin

• Company: Universal Pictures

• Year introduced: 2013

• What it was: Movie

The 2013 fantasy action film “47 Ronin”, starring Keanu Reeves, is now notorious as one of the biggest box office flops of all time. The movie lost nearly $150 million on a $225 million budget and left Universal Pictures in the red for the fiscal year. Insiders point to multiple rewrites of the screenplay as well as several post-production changes that were made as filmmakers and studio executives attempted to find creative balance while appeasing moviegoers. In the end, the film failed to strike a chord with audiences and critics alike.

34. Qwikster

• Company: Netflix

• Year introduced: 2011

• What it was: DVD rental service

Before Netflix became the media streaming giant we know today, it was exclusively a deliver-by-mail DVD rental service. In an ill-conceived strategy, CEO Reed Hastings announced in September 2011 the company's plan to spin off its DVD rental service into a separate company, known as Qwikster. The move, which was meant to allow Netflix to focus more on its streaming services, would have cost consumers about 60% more if they wished to continue to have access to both services. Unpopular with customers and widely criticized, Hastings scrapped the plan less than a month after it was announced.

35. Virtual Boy

• Company: Nintendo

• Year introduced: 1995

• What it was: Portable game console

Virtual Boy was game console maker Nintendo’s early foray into virtual reality technology. However, the company discontinued the portable console less than a year after its 1995 release, selling just 770,000 units globally. It is known as one of the company’s worst failures. To cut costs and reduce battery drain, Nintendo used only black and red shades in Virtual Boy games, which bothered some users. Using the Virtual Boy also caused eye strain in some users, which led Nintendo to include an automatic shutoff mechanism.

36. MeeGo

• Company: Nokia/Intel

• Year introduced: 2010

• What it was: Operating system

Unlike Windows Vista, another operating system on this list, smartphone OS MeeGo was not necessarily a flawed product. By most accounts, the MeeGo operating system just came at the wrong time. Not long after its introduction, the operating system was dropped by then Nokia CEO Stephen Elop in favor of Windows Phone 7 operating system. Though it has not been used in years, MeeGo may find a second life as a tablet operating system.

37. Crystal Pepsi

• Company: Pepsi

• Year introduced: 1992

• What it was: Soda

Crystal Pepsi was introduced to soda lovers across the United States in 1992. The product tasted like regular cola but was clear and caffeine free in an attempt to convey purity and heath. Crystal Pepsi was heavily promoted, with the company even buying an ad slot during Super Bowl XXVII. Despite strong initial sales, the public’s interest quickly waned and the soda was discontinued less than two years after its release.

38. Hot Wheels and Barbie computers

• Company: Mattel / Patriot Computers

• Year released: 1999

• What it was: Toy computer

In 1999, Mattel announced that it had entered a licensing agreement to sell Barbie and Hot Wheels computers. The computers would be manufactured and sold by the Patriot Computer Corporation, a privately held company based in Toronto. The move was part of an attempt to reconcile the declining sales of Barbie dolls and growing sales of software and CD-ROMs.

The computers, however, had many manufacturing flaws, and the resources Patriot devoted to fixing and replacing broken computers drove it out of business. By December the following year, the company had fired its 200 employees and filed for bankruptcy.

39. LaserDisc

• Company: Phillips

• Year introduced: 1978

• What it was: Media storage/playback device

LaserDisc was effectively a precursor to the DVD, offering consumers a higher quality picture and sound than VHS tapes. The product’s numerous drawbacks, however, outweighed any benefits. Unlike VHS players, LaserDisc players could not record television shows – an important feature before the days of TiVo. LaserDisc players, as well as LaserDiscs themselves, were also relatively expensive. Introduced in the 1970s, LaserDisc made a brief comeback in the 90s, but ultimately failed to gain traction.

40. Dreamcast

• Company: Sega

• Year introduced: 1999 (North America)

• What it was: Game console

In the 1990s, Sega was a dominant player in the consoles and games business. Sega had such success with its Sonic the Hedgehog games and Genesis console, that at one point the company held 60% of the North American market. The Dreamcast launched in 1999 in North America, within a few years of successful predecessors like the Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation. Many consider the Dreamcast to have been ahead of its time – it was the first console to introduce worldwide network compatibility – but the system just never caught on. Dreamcast sold miserably and was discontinued after just over two years, in part due to the success of the PS2, which launched in 2000. While it was not Sega’s only failure, it may have been its most colossal, marking the end of the company’s attempts at game consoles.

41. S&W Mountain Bikes

• Company: Smith & Wesson

• Year introduced: 2002

• What it was: Mountain bike

Gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson has been making police bicycles for about 20 years. The company also attempted to sell mountain bikes to the general public in 2002. Like many other products on this list, the company’s consumer bike segment likely failed because bicycles were too far beyond the scope of the Smith & Wesson brand and what most Americans associate with it.

42. Lisa

• Company: Apple

• Year introduced: 1983

• What it was: Personal computer

Before Apple hit its stride in the 2000s and became the most profitable corporation in history, the company was responsible for some of the worst product flops of all time. Designed as a high-end personal computer with a graphical user interface for business customers, the Apple Lisa took three years and $50 million to develop before its release in 1983. However, the computer’s $9,995 price tag, which is equivalent to roughly $25,000 today, was too high for many consumers. After selling just 100,000 units in two years Apple discontinued the Lisa in 1985.

43. Betamax

• Company: Sony

• Year introduced: 1975

• What it was: Videocassette format

In the early 1970s, videotapes were still a novel technology, and the VHS tape had yet to become the standard videocassette format. Sony introduced the Betamax format in 1975, one year before JVC introduced the VHS tape. While Betamax tapes had superior resolution and sound quality, Sony refrained from licensing its technology to other manufacturers, in turn limiting the variety of movies available on the format. Meanwhile, JVC licensed its VHS technology to any interested manufacturer. The Betamax’s share of the VCR market fell from 100% in 1975 to 10% in 1988, and continued to dwindle in the following years.

44. Too Human

• Company: Silicon Knights

• Year introduced: 2008

• What it was: Video game

Released in 2008 after years of costly development delays, “Too Human” failed to live up to expectations and became one of the worst flops in video game history. A legal ruling eventually removed the game from the marketplace and pushed Silicon Knights, the game’s developer, into bankruptcy. The game’s production budget skyrocketed to an estimated $100 million after the game engine developer, Epic Games, failed to deliver the engine on time, forcing Silicon Knights to build it own game engine. When Silicon Knights sued Epic Games for missing the deadline, the latter counter-sued, which resulted in a court order forcing the developer to destroy all unsold copies of the game.

45. Mobile ESPN

• Company: ESPN

• Year introduced: 2006

• What it was: Mobile phone service

In 2006, ESPN attempted to capitalize on the desire of sports fan to have access to sports stats, scores, and video on the go. Mobile ESPN required users to buy a specific phone, which would include access to ESPN content as part of the subscription. However, the only phone Mobile ESPN offered, a Sanyo, cost $400, and the service was $40 per month, too rich for many sports fans. The service shut down within a year. Disney, ESPN’s parent company, spent $150 million on the failed venture.

46. Life Savers soda

• Company: Life Savers

• Year introduced: 1995

• What it was: Soft drink

Though Life Savers soda tested well in focus groups, it failed to gain traction with the broader consumer market. Many attribute the soft drink’s failure to the prevailing perception that it was liquid candy. The soda was available in some of the candy’s popular fruit flavors, including pineapple, orange punch, grape punch, and lime punch. Life Savers did not release a mint-flavored soda, however.

47. Mars Needs Moms

• Company: Walt Disney Motion

• Year introduced: 2011

• What it was: Studio film

Released in March 2011, Disney’s “Mars Needs Moms” grossed just $6.9 million in its opening weekend. Produced with a $150 million budget, “Mars Needs Moms” was one of the worst flops in cinema history. Film critics partially blame animation studio ImageMovers Digital for the film’s box office failure. The movie was animated using an expensive motion-capture process, a technology still in its infancy. According to one viewer, “The movie looked downright creepy.” ImageMovers Digital was closed after the studio wrapped production on the film.

48. EONS

• Company: Eons.com

• Year introduced: 2006

• What it was: Social media site

In July 2006, Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor launched Eons.com – a social network for baby boomers and other internet users over the age of 50. According to surveys conducted by Pew Research Center, an estimated 32% of seniors over the age of 65 used the internet at the time of the website’s launch compared to 86% of young adults aged 18 to 29. While the share of seniors on the internet has doubled over the past decade, Eons failed to gain traction and was sold to Crew Media in 2011.

49. Supertrain

• Company: NBC

• Year introduced: 1979

• What it was: TV show

When NBC’s “Supertrain” premiered in 1979, it was the most expensive TV series ever aired. Set aboard a nuclear-powered train that travels between New York City and Los Angeles at speeds nearing 200 miles an hour, the show’s production required a model train set that cost around $3 million in today’s dollars. The model crashed during its first demonstration, and the show as a whole soon followed. Debuting to poor ratings and negative reviews, “Supertrain” was cancelled after just nine episodes.

50. Galaxy Note 7

• Company: Samsung

• Year introduced: 2016

• What it was: Tablet phone

Samsung, which has overtaken Apple in the smartphone market last year, also had one of more recent product flops. The Note S7, a phablet that launched in August 2016, was initially well-received. However, it had a serious flaw. A problem with the battery software resulted in the phones catching fire on several occasions, including once on a Southwest Airlines flight, which had to be evacuated. Soon, the Department of Transportation made it illegal to bring a Note 7 on a commercial flight. By October, after an extremely expensive recall, Samsung suspended worldwide production of the Note 7. The company lost what is estimated to be over $3 billion due to the debacle, and Apple once again took the lead in the global smartphone market earlier this year.

Price, timing can cause product failings

Hindsight is 20/20, and while many of these gaffes might not have been predictable at the time, the reasons for their failure are often much clearer today. The reasons for the failures often fall into one of a several categories: overpricing, timing, bad advertising, product flaws, and reaching beyond what consumers of a brand are willing to accept.

Sometimes products are sold at a premium because they offer features competitors do not, either perceived or actual. When customers do not feel a product is superior to another – rightly so or not – they will not pay the premium price. While Apple is able to sell computers at a premium today because of its brand perception, the Lisa, introduced in 1983, failed largely as a result of its nearly $10,000 price tag.

Many of the products on this list could have been perfectly viable, possibly even a hit, if they had been introduced at a different time. Sega’s Dreamcast was the first major console to introduce global network connectivity, but this was before every home had a stable connection fast enough to make the Dreamcast viable at the time.

For some flops on this list, it appears poor market research doomed these products. McDonald’s Arch Deluxe was marketed as a burger for those with refined palates, turning away kids, as well as many adults, from the ill-fated item. Coca-Cola completely misjudged the desire of its customers when it changed its classic flavor and introduced New Coke.

Sometimes, brands overextend their reach, introducing products that clash with their image and target demographics. One does not need to dig too deep to understand why Colgate, a brand associated with toothpaste, failed to make its line of frozen dinner products a success. The same can be said for Cosmopolitan’s brand of yogurt, Smith & Wesson’s mountain bike line, or Harley Davidson’s perfume.

Of course, many of the products on this list were simply poorly designed or faulty – at times downright dangerous. Such was the case with Mattel’s line of seriously flawed Hot Wheels and Barbie computers, or the Galaxy Note 7, plagued by battery fires that caused the phone to be banned on airplanes, recalled, and eventually discontinued.

Despite their disappointing launches, some of these products still exist today. Google’s Glass and Google+ each became the butt of jokes after failing to live up to lofty promises. One day, we may see one of these flops become the product it was meant to be.

24/7 Wall Street is a USA TODAY content partner offering financial news and commentary. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.

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Product launch blunders: 50 worst flops of all time

Michael B. Sauter, Evan Comen, Thomas C. Frohlich and Samuel Stebbins

24/7 Wall Street

Some product launches can be spectacular failures, and Google Glass, an eyeglasses shaped head-mounted device with smartphone capabilities, failed in such a manner several years ago. It was meant to be the first piece of technology to connect the typical consumer to augmented reality.

Google continues to attempt to find a place for the product, but its original launch was a definitive failure. In 2017, the internet giant announced the relaunch of the device to target to businesses rather than the general public, but whatever happens, it will be adopted by a meaningfully narrower audience.

Just like success, failure is part of doing business. Entrepreneurs and large companies often take big risks, hoping for success but not always achieving it.

These failures take many different forms. When a product doesn’t sell, when it is recalled or discontinued, or when it otherwise does not come close to meeting a company’s expectations or plans, it can be marked as a failure. While failures are expected, some can be so catastrophic they can lead to permanent damage to a company’s reputation, layoffs, and even complete financial ruin.

Sometimes, it can take years, or even decades for a product flop to disappear from the market. This was the case with Betamax a video format which Sony introduced, expecting it to replace VHS. Despite being technologically superior to VHS, Betamax lost market share until it eventually vanished.

24/7 Wall Street reviewed some of the greatest product launch blunders throughout history. Today, these product flops exist as case studies companies use to avoid future failure. They range from Ford’s Edsel in 1958 to 2016’s Galaxy Note 7. Many of these products led to losses in the hundreds of millions, and sometimes billions. In tech, film, the internet, the pharmaceutical industry, and more, these are the biggest product flops of all time.

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1. Google Glass

Company: Google

Google Year introduced: 2013

2013 What it was: Wearable technology

Google first announced Google Glass -- an eyeglasses shaped head-mounted display with smartphone capabilities -- to the public in 2012. The announcement began with a statement of principle: “We think technology should work for you -- to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.” After two years of disappointing sales, it was clear consumers did not need Google Glass. Google stuck to its principle, and in 2015 discontinued the product’s development. Privacy concerns, reported bugs, low battery life, bans from public spaces, and an inability to live up to the hype all stymied public adoption of the technology.

2. The Newton

Company: Apple

Apple Year introduced: 1993

1993 What it was: Personal digital assistant

While the personal digital assistant would become a popular consumer electronics product in the late 1990s, the first PDA was one of the biggest product flops of all time. One year after Apple CEO John Sculley coined the term “PDA” in 1992, the company released the Newton MessagePad. While the device incorporated innovative technology such as a pen-based touch screen and the ability to sync with software on a personal computer, Apple sold only 50,000 units of the product in its first four months on the market. The Newton product line was discontinued in 1998.

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3. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

Company: Atari

Atari Year introduced: 1982

1982 What it was: Video game

Several video games have failed over the years, but arguably none as spectacularly as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The video game was created/developed shortly after the release of Steven Spielberg’s classic film. With only five weeks spent in development -- games typically take months, if not years, to program -- the game was notoriously difficult and sold miserably. Atari spent $21 million to purchase the rights to the franchise and $5 million on promotion of the game. The company made 4 million copies of the game, but sold only 1.5 million. Atari buried the leftover copies in a landfill.

4. Satisfries

Company: Burger King

Burger King Year introduced: 2013

2013 What it was: French fries

In 2013, Burger King introduced a new menu item advertised as a healthy alternative to their traditional french fries. Satisfries used a less porous batter, which caused the fry to absorb less oil than regular fries during cooking. While Satisfries were made with a healthier recipe, Burger King failed to convey the difference to customers. The fries were also more expensive than Burger King’s regular french fries, and failed to gain traction with consumers. The company discontinued the fries in 2014, less than a year after they were introduced.

5. Premier smokeless cigarettes

Company: RJ Reynolds

RJ Reynolds Year introduced: 1988

1988 What it was: Cigarette

R.J. Reynolds, the second largest U.S. tobacco company, began marketing in 1988 a smokeless tobacco product that was intended to be a safer way to use a cigarette. In addition to concerns over the product's actual safety, smokers missed the familiar elements of traditional cigarettes -- the smoke, the burn, and the flick. Another issue was the widely-reported unpleasant chemical taste, which one user described as resembling “burning plastic.” Reynolds sunk close to $1 billion into the product before pulling it off the market within a year.

6. Cheetos Lip Balm

Company: Frito-Lay

Frito-Lay Year introduced: 2005

2005 What it was: Lip balm

Popular lip balm brands such as Chapstick, Blistex, and Burt’s Bees, have successfully sold their products to Americans for decades. Many prefer such flavored varieties as cherry, mint, and vanilla bean. Not every popular flavor can be successfully turned into a lip balm, however, a lesson PepsiCo subsidiary Frito-Lay learned the hard way in 2005. While Cheetos has been a popular snack for more than six decades, Cheetos-flavored lip balm failed to catch on with consumers.

7. Terra Nova

Company: Fox

Fox Year introduced: 2011

2011 What it was: TV show

Every year, TV shows are cancelled before the end of their first season. While Terra Nova, which aired for one 13-episode season, is not unusual in this regard, it may go down as the most costly cancelled television show of all time. Documenting the time-traveling adventures of a 22nd century family fleeing a dystopian society for a prehistoric past, the pilot of the show alone cost Fox between $16 and $20 million to make. Terra Nova encountered numerous production mishaps while filming in Australia, including a flood that nearly killed a crew member. Ratings failed to meet expectations, and the show was not renewed for a second season. Fox is estimated to have spent more than $50 million on the failed show, not including marketing costs.

8. Touch of Yogurt shampoo

Company: Clairol

Clairol Year introduced: 1979

1979 What it was: Shampoo

In keeping with the 1970s trend of incorporating natural food ingredients like lemon, herbs, and honey into beauty and hygiene products, Clairol -- at the time a subsidiary of Bristol-Myers Squibb -- thought a yogurt shampoo was just what the American consumer wanted. It turned out the company had grossly miscalculated. Many consumers were apparently confused as to what they had bought, as there were reported cases of people eating the shampoo.

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9. New Coke

Company: Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola Year introduced: 1985

1985 What it was: Soft drink

Over the 15 years leading up to 1985, Coca-Cola’s flagship cola drink had been losing market share to Pepsi Cola. To compete, the company changed the drink’s formula for the first time in 99 years -- but the move today is considered one of the greatest flops of all time. New Coke was met with public outrage and lasted only a few months. The company reintroduced its older formula, rebranded as Coca-Cola Classic.

10. Windows Vista

Company: Microsoft

Microsoft Year introduced: 2007

2007 What it was: Operating system

Introduced in 2007 as a follow-up to Windows XP, the Windows Vista operating system was everything its popular predecessor was not -- in all the wrong ways. Panned by customers and IT professionals alike, Vista reduced PC performance and caused a number of internet problems for users. As a result, Dell began offering Windows XP again on new laptops a few short months after Vista was introduced. Windows announced this month that it would no longer provide support for Vista, driving the final nail into the operating system’s coffin.

11. Kitchen Entrees

Company: Colgate

Colgate Year introduced: 1982

1982 What it was: Frozen meal

Many of the worst product flops in recent memory were caused by otherwise popular brands wandering too far outside of their area of expertise. Colgate Kitchen Entrees may be the best example of such a product failure. When it came to pre-prepared frozen meals, Americans had plenty of options in the 1980s. Perhaps because consumers naturally associated the Colgate name with toothpaste, there was never much of an appetite for pre-made meals bearing the Colgate logo.

12. Coors Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water

Company: Coors

Coors Year introduced: 1990

1990 What it was: Sparkling water

Coors and Coors Light are two of the most popular beers in the United States. Introducing Coors Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water to the public in 1990, the Coors Brewing Company also sought to capitalize on the fast-growing bottled water segment in the United States. The water was Coors' first non-alcoholic product since Prohibition. The Coors brand name did not help to sell the product, however, as the beer-name branding may have confused or even frightened consumers. Coors let its trademark of Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water expire in 1997.

13. Harley Davidson perfume

Company: Harley Davidson

Harley Davidson Year released: 1994

1994 What it was: Perfume

Harley Davidson is one of the most iconic and valuable brands in the world. It is also one of the most masculine brands. The company has not deviated considerably from this manly personality, although it has tried. The company released Legendary Harley-Davidson, a cologne for men, among several other varieties, starting in 1994. Another perfume, Black Fire, hit the market as recently as 2005. All are now discontinued. In the 1990s, the company released a number of other products, including wine coolers and aftershave, which after failing miserably have also become classic cases of brand overextension.

14. Persil Power

Holding company: Unilever

Unilever Year released: 1994

1994 What it was: Stain remover

Unilever introduced Persil Power detergent to the market in 1994. The product utilized a newly patented stain removal formula called Accelerator. The company was so confident in the Accelerator catalyst that it carried out its $300 million introduction of Persil Power without any formal test marketing. Over time, it became clear the detergent was damaging clothes at high temperatures. After nine months on the shelves, the company replaced Persil Power with Persil New Generation, a detergent without the Accelerator compound.

15. Cosmopolitan yogurt

Company: Cosmopolitan

Cosmopolitan Year introduced: 1999

1999 What it was: Yogurt

Cosmopolitan is a popular women’s magazine, full of fashion advice, dating tips, celebrity gossip, and horoscopes. What the magazine’s leadership was thinking when they expanded the brand’s reach from the magazine aisle to the dairy aisle remains a mystery. Few will likely remember the 1999 debut of Cosmopolitan’s yogurt line, as the short-lived product was only available for 18 months. Like many other products on this list, Cosmopolitan yogurt was a case of a brand reaching too far beyond its area of expertise.

16. DH 106 Comet

Company: De Havilland

De Havilland Year introduced: 1949

1949 What it was: Airplane

We now take jet travel for granted, but the development of a commercially viable jetliner involved a great deal of trial, error, and some utter failures. De Havilland, a British aircraft manufacturer, developed the Comet, the first commercial jet airliner. Unfortunately, within a few years of its 1949 debut, the Comet encountered several unexplained fatal crashes, including planes overrunning the runway and one exploding in midair. The Comet's reputation plummeted, and while De Havilland scrambled to redesign the plane, American companies Douglas and Boeing took over the industry.

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17. DeLorean DMC-12

Company: Delorean Motor Company

Delorean Motor Company Year introduced: 1981

1981 What it was: Sports car

In 1973, auto executive John DeLorean left General Motors to form the DeLorean Motor Company. After years of production delays, the DeLorean DMC-12 was released in January 1981. The car’s unique design was poorly received, however, and by 1982 less than half of the 7,000 DeLorean units produced had been sold. The DeLorean is widely recognized due to its use as a converted time machine in the “Back to the Future” series. However, the first of these films was released in 1985, far too late to save the ill-fated brand. DeLorean filed for bankruptcy in 1982.

18. EZ Squirt

Company: Heinz

Heinz Year released: 2000

2000 Company revenue when released: Ketchup

Before EZ Squirt, ketchup was always varying shades of red. To cater to kids, who were -- and still are -- among ketchup’s largest groups of consumers, Heinz began producing purple, green, and blue EZ Squirt ketchup in matching, vibrantly colored squeeze bottles. At first, the colorful ketchup was a huge success. The novelty wore off quickly, however, and not long after its introduction, sales of EZ Squirt began to decline. In January 2006, less than six years after its debut, Heinz halted production of the product.

19. United States Football League

Company: USFL

USFL Year introduced: 1982

1982 What it was: Sports league

Conceived as a way to satiate America's appetite for football in the spring and summer months, the United States Football League was introduced in 1982. The league originally consisted of 12 teams, one of which, the New Jersey Generals, was owned by President Donald Trump. The league was beset with problems, not the least of which was finding stadiums to play in. Ultimately, over half a dozen teams folded when the league’s brain trust decided to compete directly with the NFL by scheduling games in the fall. By 1985, the league was finished.

20. Home

Company: Facebook

Facebook Year introduced: 2013

2013 What it was: Mobile phone app

With rising mobile phone use and social media engagement, Facebook in 2013 decided to launch a family of apps that combine these trends. Facebook Home converts the home screen of a smartphone into the Facebook news feed. While most of Facebook’s over 1 billion users log in to their accounts on a smartphone, the social media giant’s new product never caught on. Early users cited clunky operation, the inability to toggle between Facebook Home and the original phone interface, and lack of options for customization, among other snags.

21. Edsel

Company: Ford

Ford Year introduced: 1957

1957 What it was: Car

Ford spent a year aggressively marketing the Edsel -- named after Henry Ford’s son -- ahead of its 1957 release. It was to be the “car of the future,” made available on dealership lots on what Ford dubbed “E-Day." Despite the hype, the car was a commercial disaster. It was considerably overpriced, disappointingly not futuristic, and generally ugly. Ford ceased the car's production after only two years, losing an estimated $350 million.

22. Friendster

Company: Friendster

Friendster Year introduced: 2002

2002 What it was: Social media site

Social media site Facebook is one of the biggest corporate success stories in recent memory. Unfortunately, when it comes to social media, for every success story there is at least one flop -- as in the case of Friendster. The site’s users suffered through slow page loading times and the company’s developers failed to scale up when the number of subscribers spiked. Ultimately, competitors such as Facebook provided a much better user experience. Introduced in 2002, Friendster discontinued its services in mid-2015.

23. WOW! Chips

Company: Frito-Lay

Frito-Lay Year introduced: 1998

1998 What it was: Snack

PepsiCo subsidiary Frito-Lay introduced its line of WOW! Chips in 1998. The chips, which were made with the fat substitute olestra, were marketed as a healthy snacking alternative. While WOW! Chips were an initial success with $347 million in sales in their first year -- the most of any new product in 1998 -- sales slowed when the unpleasant side effects of olestra, such as diarrhea and cramps, became better known. To add to the product’s problems, the Food and Drug Administration instituted labeling requirements for all products containing olestra to carry warnings of “abdominal cramping and loose stools," and by 2000, sales of WOW! Chips were roughly 60% of what they were in the year of their release.

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24. Zune

Company: Microsoft

Microsoft Year introduced: 2006

2006 What it was: MP3 player

In an attempt to compete with Apple's dominant iPod MP3 player, Microsoft released the Zune in 2006. As of November 15, 2015, Microsoft discontinued all streaming, downloading, and other music services for the Zune. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, Microsoft recorded a 42% decline in revenue in its non-gaming devices segment -- a decline largely attributable to the Zune’s poor performance. While the device might have been a reasonable choice for consumers, a number of reported bugs did not help sales. On December 31, 2008, most if not all 30GB Zunes stopped functioning simply because the underlying code had failed to account for the extra day in leap years.

25. Relenza

Company: GlaxoSmithKline

GlaxoSmithKline Year introduced: 1999

1999 What it was: Influenza pandemic drug

In 1999, a flu pandemic fear caused by the spread of avian flu created demand for antiviral medications. The FDA approved two flu drugs during the pandemic -- Tamiflu and Relenza. The former went on to report massive sales, while the latter became one of the worst product flops in the pharmaceutical industry. The powder form of the drug caused respiratory problems in some patients and was only approved as a treatment for influenza rather than a preventative measure. GlaxoSmithKline sold just $13 million worth of the drug in the first quarter of 2006. By comparison, Roche reported $770 million in Tamiflu sales in the first half of the year.

26. Google+

Company: Google

Google Year introduced: 2011

2011 What it was: Social media site

No all product flops are necessarily discontinued. Sometimes, despite failing to live up to company expectations, they linger. Such is the case with Google+, the social media platform the Silicon Valley giant launched in 2011 to compete with Facebook. However, even with a monumental marketing campaign, Google+ failed to distinguish itself from Facebook and never took off in the same manner. While the site experienced an initial surge in subscribers, by April 2015, Google+ had experienced a 98% decline in user engagement. Today, Google+ has some active user groups and is often used to share photos.

27. HP Touchpad

Company: Hewlett-Packard

Hewlett-Packard Year introduced: 2011

2011 What it was: Tablet computer

The TouchPad was Hewlett Packard’s attempt to compete with Apple’s wildly successful iPad. Hewlett Packard unveiled the device in the middle of 2011 with an extremely costly advertising campaign. The rollout incorporated numerous celebrity contracts. By late summer, however, box stores such as Best Buy were sitting on excess inventory, and HP began offering steep discounts. Many discounted TouchPads were sold at a loss, and it is estimated the company lost hundreds of millions on the product in all.

28. Kellogg's Breakfast Mates

Company: Kellogg's

Kellogg's Year introduced: 1998

1998 What it was: Breakfast food

In 1998, Kellogg’s introduced Breakfast Mates, an all-in-one package containing a serving of cereal, a small carton of milk, and a plastic spoon. The product was designed as a time saver that would appeal busy families with two working parents. The stated convenience of the all-in-one packaging did little to save time, largely because traditional cereal is already relatively convenient to consume. In a controlled test reported by The New York Times, preparing a bowl of cereal the traditional way took only one second longer than preparing a bowl of Breakfast Mates. To make matters worse, the product’s $30 million ad campaign sent a mixed message, depicting a family eating the supposedly portable cereal around the kitchen table. In August 1999, Kellogg’s announced Breakfast Mates would be discontinued due to low sales.

29. Maxwell House Brewed Coffee

Company: Maxwell House

Maxwell House Year introduced: 1990

1990 What it was: Coffee

Maxwell House Brewed Coffee was pre-brewed coffee sold in a carton with a picture of a hot mug of coffee on the packaging, a misleading visual cue for a product meant to be stored in the refrigerator. Adding to the product’s issues, the carton was lined with foil and could not be microwaved. For a product marketed for its convenience, this was an especially problematic feature for consumers. The product was discontinued shortly after it was released.

30. Arch Deluxe

Company: McDonald's

McDonald's Year introduced: 1996

1996 What it was: Hamburger

McDonald’s introduced several failed products throughout its 60-year history, but none so monumental as the Arch Deluxe. Introduced in 1996, the Arch Deluxe was marketed as a more gastronomic hamburger with “a grown-up taste." One commercial featured a child unable to enjoy the sophisticated burger, stripping its toppings to satisfy his unrefined palate. The Arch Deluxe’s advertising budget was an estimated $200 million, the most of any fast food product at the time. However, the approach failed and sales of the Arch Deluxe missed the $1 billion expectation set for its first year. The Arch Deluxe was eventually discontinued.

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31. HD DVD

Company: Toshiba

Toshiba Year introduced: 2006

2006 What it was: Media storage/playback device

Blu-ray’s succession of the DVD was not preordained. Before Blu-ray was the dominant medium for video playback, it was competing with Toshiba’s HD DVD. Essentially the same product, HD DVD was effectively taken out to pasture when in January 2008, Warner Bros. announced it would only support Sony’s Blu-ray format. Toshiba was not the only loser in the battle against Blu-ray. Millions of Americans found themselves stuck with HD DVD players and laptops after the dust settled.

32. Microsoft Bob

Company: Microsoft

Microsoft Year introduced: 1995

1995 What it was: User interface

Microsoft released Microsoft Bob in March 1995. Intended as a simple, easy-to-use OS interface at the time, Bob presented the desktop as a house, with familiar objects corresponding with different computer applications. Clicking on the stationary lying on a desk, for example, opened the word processor. Despite its simple appearance, Bob required more processing power than most home computers had in 1995. Bob was also considered too expensive and poorly designed, and was overshadowed by the release of Windows 95 later that year. Bob was discontinued roughly a year after its release.

33. 47 Ronin

Company: Universal Pictures

Universal Pictures Year introduced: 2013

2013 What it was: Movie

The 2013 fantasy action film “47 Ronin”, starring Keanu Reeves, is now notorious as one of the biggest box office flops of all time. The movie lost nearly $150 million on a $225 million budget and left Universal Pictures in the red for the fiscal year. Insiders point to multiple rewrites of the screenplay as well as several post-production changes that were made as filmmakers and studio executives attempted to find creative balance while appeasing moviegoers. In the end, the film failed to strike a chord with audiences and critics alike.

34. Qwikster

Company: Netflix

Netflix Year introduced: 2011

2011 What it was: DVD rental service

Before Netflix became the media streaming giant we know today, it was exclusively a deliver-by-mail DVD rental service. In an ill conceived of strategy, CEO Reed Hastings announced in September 2011 the company's plan to spin off its DVD rental service into a separate company, known as Qwikster. The move, which was meant to allow Netflix to focus more on its streaming services, would have cost consumers about 60% more if they wished to continue to have access to both services. Unpopular with customers and widely criticized, Hastings scrapped the plan less than a month after it was announced.

35. Virtual Boy

Company: Nintendo

Nintendo Year introduced: 1995

1995 What it was: Portable game console

Virtual Boy was game console maker Nintendo’s early foray into virtual reality technology. However, the company discontinued the portable console less than a year after its 1995 release, selling just 770,000 units globally. It is known as one of the company’s worst failures. To cut costs and reduce battery drain, Nintendo used only black and red shades in Virtual Boy games, which bothered some users. Using the Virtual Boy also caused eye strain in some users, which led Nintendo to include an automatic shutoff mechanism.

36. MeeGo

Company: Nokia/Intel

Nokia/Intel Year introduced: 2010

2010 What it was: Operating system

Unlike Windows Vista, another operating system on this list, smartphone OS MeeGo was not necessarily a flawed product. By most accounts, the MeeGo operating system just came at the wrong time. Not long after its introduction, the operating system was dropped by then Nokia CEO Stephen Elop in favor of Windows Phone 7 operating system. Though it has not been used in years, MeeGo may find a second life as a tablet operating system.

37. Crystal Pepsi

Company: Pepsi

Pepsi Year introduced: 1992

1992 What it was: Soda

Crystal Pepsi was introduced to soda lovers across the United States in 1992. The product tasted like regular cola but was clear and caffeine free in an attempt to convey purity and heath. Crystal Pepsi was heavily promoted, with the company even buying an ad slot during Super Bowl XXVII. Despite strong initial sales, the public’s interest quickly waned and the soda was discontinued less than two years after its release.

38. Hot Wheels and Barbie computers

Company: Mattel / Patriot Computers

Mattel / Patriot Computers Year released: 1999

1999 What it was: Toy computer

In 1999, Mattel announced that it had entered a licensing agreement to sell Barbie and Hot Wheels computers. The computers would be manufactured and sold by the Patriot Computer Corporation, a privately held company based in Toronto. The move was part of an attempt to reconcile the declining sales of Barbie dolls and growing sales of software and CD-ROMs.

The computers, however, had many manufacturing flaws, and the resources Patriot devoted to fixing and replacing broken computers drove it out of business. By December the following year, the company had fired its 200 employees and filed for bankruptcy.

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39. LaserDisc

Company: Phillips

Phillips Year introduced: 1978

1978 What it was: Media storage/playback device

LaserDisc was effectively a precursor to the DVD, offering consumers a higher quality picture and sound than VHS tapes. The product’s numerous drawbacks, however, outweighed any benefits. Unlike VHS players, LaserDisc players could not record television shows -- an important feature before the days of TiVo. LaserDisc players, as well as LaserDiscs themselves, were also relatively expensive. Introduced in the 1970s, LaserDisc made a brief comeback in the 90s, but ultimately failed to gain traction.

40. Dreamcast

Company: Sega

Sega Year introduced: 1999 (North America)

1999 (North America) What it was: Game console

In the 1990s, Sega was a dominant player in the consoles and games business. Sega had such success with its Sonic the Hedgehog games and Genesis console, that at one point the company held 60% of the North American market. The Dreamcast launched in 1999 in North America, within a few years of successful predecessors like the Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation. Many consider the Dreamcast to have been ahead of its time -- it was the first console to introduce worldwide network compatibility -- but the system just never caught on. Dreamcast sold miserably and was discontinued after just over two years, in part due to the success of the PS2, which launched in 2000. While it was not Sega’s only failure, it may have been its most colossal, marking the end of the company’s attempts at game consoles.

41. S&W Mountain Bikes

Company: Smith & Wesson

Smith & Wesson Year introduced: 2002

2002 What it was: Mountain bike

Gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson has been making police bicycles for about 20 years. The company also attempted to sell mountain bikes to the general public in 2002. Like many other products on this list, the company’s consumer bike segment likely failed because bicycles were too far beyond the scope of the Smith & Wesson brand and what most Americans associate with it.

42. Lisa

Company: Apple

Apple Year introduced: 1983

1983 What it was: Personal computer

Before Apple hit its stride in the 2000s and became the most profitable corporation in history, the company was responsible for some of the worst product flops of all time. Designed as a high-end personal computer with a graphical user interface for business customers, the Apple Lisa took three years and $50 million to develop before its release in 1983. However, the computer’s $9,995 price tag, which is equivalent to roughly $25,000 today, was too high for many consumers. After selling just 100,000 units in two years Apple discontinued the Lisa in 1985.

43. Betamax

Company: Sony

Sony Year introduced: 1975

1975 What it was: Video cassette format

In the early 1970s, videotapes were still a novel technology, and the VHS tape had yet to become the standard video cassette format. Sony introduced the Betamax format in 1975, one year before JVC introduced the VHS tape. While Betamax tapes had superior resolution and sound quality, Sony refrained from licensing its technology to other manufacturers, in turn limiting the variety of movies available on the format. Meanwhile, JVC licensed its VHS technology to any interested manufacturer. The Betamax’s share of the VCR market fell from 100% in 1975 to 10% in 1988, and continued to dwindle in the following years.

44. Too Human

Company: Silicon Knights

Silicon Knights Year introduced: 2008

2008 What it was: Video game

Released in 2008 after years of costly development delays, “Too Human” failed to live up to expectation and became one of the worst flops in video game history. A legal ruling eventually removed the game from the marketplace and pushed Silicon Knights, the game’s developer, into bankruptcy. The game’s production budget skyrocketed to an estimated $100 million after the game engine developer, Epic Games, failed to deliver the engine on time, forcing Silicon Knights to build it own game engine. When Silicon Knights sued Epic Games for missing the deadline, the latter counter-sued, which resulted in a court order forcing the developer to destroy all unsold copies of the game.

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45. Mobile ESPN

Company: ESPN

ESPN Year introduced: 2006

2006 What it was: Mobile phone service

In 2006, ESPN attempted to capitalize on the desire of sports fan to have access to sports stats, scores, and video on the go. Mobile ESPN required users to buy a specific phone, which would include access to ESPN content as part of the subscription. However, the only phone Mobile ESPN offered, a Sanyo, cost $400, and the service was $40 per month, too rich for many sports fans. The service shut down within a year. Disney, ESPN’s parent company, spent $150 million on the failed venture.

46. Life Savers soda

Company: Life Savers

Life Savers Year introduced: 1995

1995 What it was: Soft drink

Though Life Savers soda tested well in focus groups, it failed to gain traction with the broader consumer market. Many attribute the soft drink’s failure to the prevailing perception that it was liquid candy. The soda was available in some of the candy’s popular fruit flavors, including pineapple, orange punch, grape punch, and lime punch. Life Savers did not release a mint flavored soda, however.

47. Mars Needs Moms

Company: Walt Disney Motion

Walt Disney Motion Year introduced: 2011

2011 What it was: Studio film

Released in March 2011, Disney’s “Mars Needs Moms” grossed just $6.9 million in its opening weekend. Produced with a $150 million budget, “Mars Needs Moms” was one of the worst flops in cinema history. Film critics partially blame animation studio ImageMovers Digital for the film’s box office failure. The movie was animated using an expensive motion-capture process, a technology still in its infancy. According to one viewer, “The movie looked downright creepy.” ImageMovers Digital was closed after the studio wrapped production on the film.

48. EONS

Company: Eons.com

Eons.com Year introduced: 2006

2006 What it was: Social media site

In July 2006, Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor launched Eons.com -- a social network for baby boomers and other internet users over the age of 50. According to surveys conducted by Pew Research Center, an estimated 32% of seniors over the age of 65 used the internet at the time of the website’s launch compared to 86% of young adults aged 18 to 29. While the share of seniors on the internet has doubled over the past decade, Eons failed to gain traction and was sold to Crew Media in 2011.

49. Supertrain

Company: NBC

NBC Year introduced: 1979

1979 What it was: TV show

When NBC’s “Supertrain” premiered in 1979, it was the most expensive TV series ever aired. Set aboard a nuclear-powered train that travels between New York City and Los Angeles at speeds nearing 200 miles an hour, the show’s production required a model train set that cost around $3 million in today’s dollars. The model crashed during its first demonstration, and the show as a whole soon followed. Debuting to poor ratings and negative reviews, “Supertrain” was cancelled after just nine episodes.

50. Galaxy Note 7

Company: Samsung

Samsung Year introduced: 2016

2016 What it was: Tablet phone

Samsung, which has overtaken Apple in the smartphone market last year, also had one of (the larger and--optional) more recent product flops. The Note S7, a phablet that launched in August 2016, was initially well received. However, it had a serious flaw. A problem with the battery software resulted in the phones catching fire on several occasions, including once on a SouthWest Airlines flight, which had to be evacuated. Soon, the Department of Transportation made it illegal to bring a Note 7 on a commercial flight. By October, after an extremely expensive recall, Samsung suspended worldwide production of the Note 7. The company lost what is estimated to be over $3 billion due to the debacle, and Apple once again took the lead in the global smartphone market earlier this year.

More: Can you afford that new vehicle? 25 most expensive car models to insure

Detailed findings and methodology

Hindsight is 20/20, and while many of these gaffes might not have been predictable at the time, the reasons for their failure are often much clearer today. The reasons for the failures often fall into one of a several categories: overpricing, timing, bad advertising, product flaws, and reaching beyond what consumers of a brand are willing to accept.

Sometimes products are sold at a premium because they offer features competitors do not, either perceived or actual. When customers do not feel a product is superior to another -- rightly so or not -- they will not pay the premium price. While Apple is able to sell computers at a premium today because of its brand perception, the Lisa, introduced in 1983, failed largely as a result of its nearly $10,000 price tag.

Many of the products on this list could have been perfectly viable, possibly even a hit, if they had been introduced at a different time. Sega’s Dreamcast was the first major console to introduce global network connectivity, but this was before every home had a stable connection fast enough to make the Dreamcast viable at the time.

For some flops on this list, it appears poor market research doomed these products. McDonald’s Arch Deluxe was marketed as a burger for those with refined palates, turning away kids, as well as many adults, from the ill-fated item. Coca-Cola completely misjudged the desire of its customers when it changed its classic flavor and introduced New Coke.

Sometimes, brands overextend their reach, introducing products that clash with their image and target demographics. One does not need to dig too deep to understand why Colgate, a brand associated with toothpaste, failed to make its line of frozen dinner products a success. The same can be said for Cosmopolitan’s brand of yogurt, Smith & Wesson’s mountain bike line, or Harley Davidson’s perfume.

Of course, many of the products on this list were simply poorly designed or faulty -- at times downright dangerous. Such was the case with Mattel’s line of seriously flawed Hot Wheels and Barbie computers, or the Galaxy Note 7, plagued by battery fires that caused the phone to be banned on airplanes, recalled, and eventually discontinued.

Despite their disappointing launches, some of these products still exist today. Google’s Glass and Google+ each became the butt of jokes after failing to live up to lofty promises. One day, we may see one of these flops become the product it was meant to be.

24/7 Wall Street is a USA TODAY content partner offering financial news and commentary. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.

Ultraprocessed food may contribute to dementia, study says | CNN

Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Eat, But Better: Mediterranean Style. Our eight-part guide shows you a delicious expert-backed eating lifestyle that will boost your health for life.

CNN —

We all eat them — ultraprocessed foods such as frozen pizza and ready-to-eat meals make our busy lives much easier. Besides, they are just darn tasty — who isn’t susceptible to hot dogs, sausages, burgers, french fries, sodas, cookies, cakes, candy, doughnuts and ice cream, to name just a few?

If more than 20% of your daily calorie intake is ultraprocessed foods, however, you may be raising your risk for cognitive decline, a new study found.

That amount would equal about 400 calories a day in a 2,000-calories-a-day diet. For comparison, a small order of fries and regular cheeseburger from McDonald’s contains a total of 530 calories.

The part of the brain involved in executive functioning — the ability to process information and make decisions — is especially hard hit, according to the study published Monday in JAMA Neurology.

In fact, men and women who ate the most ultraprocessed foods had a 28% faster rate of global cognitive decline and a 25% faster rate of executive function decline compared with people who ate the least amount of overly processed food, the study found.

“While this is a study of association, not designed to prove cause and effect, there are a number or elements to fortify the proposition that some acceleration in cognitive decay may be attributed to ultraprocessed foods,” said Dr. David Katz, a specialist in preventive and lifestyle medicine and nutrition, who was not involved in the study.

“The sample size is substantial, and the follow-up extensive. While short of proof, this is robust enough that we should conclude ultraprocessed foods are probably bad for our brains.”

There was an interesting twist, however. If the quality of the overall diet was high — meaning the person also ate a lot of unprocessed, whole fruits and veggies, whole grains and healthy sources of protein — the association between ultraprocessed foods and cognitive decline disappeared, Katz said.

“Ultraprocessed foods drag diet quality down, and thus their concentration in the diet is an indicator of poor diet quality in most cases,” Katz said. “Atypical as it seems, apparently some of the participants managed it. And when diet quality was high, the observed association between ultraprocessed foods and brain function abated.”

Ultraprocessed foods, like burgers and fries, could raise your risk for cognitive decline if it's more than 20% of your daily calorie intake, a new study found. d3sign/Moment RF/Getty Images

It’s not a lot of calories

The study, presented Monday at the 2022 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in San Diego, followed over 10,000 Brazilians for up to 10 years. Just over half of the study participants were women, White or college educated, while the average age was 51.

Cognitive testing, which included immediate and delayed word recall, word recognition and verbal fluency were performed at the beginning and end of the study, and participants were asked about their diet.

“In Brazil, ultraprocessed foods make up 25% to 30% of total calorie intake. We have McDonald’s, Burger King and we eat a lot of chocolate and white bread. It’s not very different, unfortunately, from many other Western countries,” said coauthor Dr. Claudia Suemoto, an assistant professor in the division of geriatrics at the University of São Paulo Medical School.

“Fifty-eight percent of the calories consumed by United States citizens, 56.8% of the calories consumed by British citizens, and 48% of the calories consumed by Canadians come from ultraprocessed foods,” Suemoto said.

Ultraprocessed foods are defined as “industrial formulations of food substances (oils, fats, sugars, starch, and protein isolates) that contain little or no whole foods and typically include flavorings, colorings, emulsifiers, and other cosmetic additives,” according to the study.

“People who consumed more than 20% of daily calories from processed foods had a 28% faster decline in global cognition and a 25% faster decline in executive functioning compared to people who ate less than 20%,” said study coauthor Natalia Gonçalves, a researcher in the department of pathology at the University of São Paulo Medical School.

It’s not just the brain

In addition to the impact on cognition, ultraprocessed foods are already known to raise the risk of obesity, heart and circulation problems, diabetes, cancer and a shorter life span.

“Ultraprocessed foods in general are bad for every part of us,” said Katz, president and founder of the nonprofit True Health Initiative, a global coalition of experts dedicated to evidence-based lifestyle medicine.

Ultaprocessed foods are usually high in sugar, salt and fat, all of which promote inflammation throughout the body, which is “perhaps the most major threat to healthy aging in the body and brain,” said Dr. Rudy Tanzi, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and director of the genetics and aging research unit at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He was not involved in the study.

“Meanwhile, since they are convenient as a quick meal, they also replace eating food that is high in plant fiber that is important for maintaining the health and balance of the trillions of bacteria in your gut microbiome,” Tanzi added, “which is particularly important for brain health and reducing risk of age-related brain diseases like Alzheimer’s disease.”

What to do

How can you keep this from happening to you? If you include ultraprocessed foods in your diet, try to counter these by also eating high-quality, whole foods such as fruits, vegetables and whole grains.

“The conclusion suggested here is that ultraprocessed foods are, indeed, an important ‘ingredient,’ but the exposure that should be the focus of public health efforts is overall diet quality,” Katz said.

One easy way to ensure diet quality is to cook and prepare your food from scratch, Suemoto said.

“People need to know they should cook more and prepare their own food from scratch. I know. We say we don’t have time but it really doesn’t take that much time,” Suemoto said.

“And it’s worth it because you’re going to protect your heart and guard your brain from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease,” she added. “That’s the take-home message: Stop buying things that are superprocessed.”

Iowa bottle bill changes advance in Senate, would let stores opt out

Iowa lawmakers are more determined than ever to overhaul the state's decades-old bottle and can redemption program — but don't crack open a celebratory beverage just yet.

Senate lawmakers passed their proposal, Senate File 2378, Tuesday on a 31-18 vote. Every Republican voted yes except Sen. Mark Lofgren, R-Muscatine, who joined Democrats in voting no. It was the first time in years that the issue has been debated by a full chamber of the Legislature.

Lawmakers have been repeatedly stymied when attempting to update the law, which allows Iowans to return empty cans and bottles to grocery stores and other retailers to get back a 5-cent deposit that they paid when buying the drink. Some have tried to scrap the program, and others have argued for expanding it, saying it encourages people to recycle their containers rather than throwing them away.

House Republicans have their own plan this year — with key differences from the Senate version — and it's not clear the two chambers will be able to reach an agreement this year since the end of the legislative session is potentially just a few weeks away.

Kick the can:Iowa's bottle bill was falling apart — and then the pandemic made things worse

The House had been scheduled to debate its own bill, House File 2571, Tuesday afternoon, but pulled it from the calendar following the Senate vote.

"We’re letting some negotiations play out before determining our next step," Rep. Brian Lohse, R-Bondurant, one of the authors of the House bill, said in a statement Tuesday. "We remain hopeful that we will be able to come together and reach an agreement on a good bill for Iowa."

Last Thursday, Sen. Dan Dawson, R-Council Bluffs, who chairs the Ways and Means Committee, said during a taping of "Iowa Press" on Iowa PBS that "I wouldn't predict this is the year yet."

"I do think momentum is building towards getting something finally done on that. I don't know that this is the year or not," Dawson said of the law. "But I do think that post-pandemic a lot of Iowans are starting to take a look at how we recycle and maybe trying to find a way to refresh the old system."

Even the bill's floor manager, Sen. Jason Schultz, R-Schleswig, acknowledged the legislation had made more progress than in past years.

"I didn’t fully expect to get to this point," he said.

But Democrats said the Senate's bill would in essence kill the decades-old law by giving Iowans fewer opportunities to return their bottles and cans.

"Iowans have been loud and clear," Sen. Bill Dotzler, D-Waterloo, said in a statement. "They have been frustrated with the loss of redemption centers and the refusal of some retailers to accept containers. This bill takes us in the wrong direction and would mean the death of the bottle bill."

What would the House and Senate bottle bill plans do?

One of lawmakers' central aims is to prop up Iowa's redemption centers, which have struggled to make ends meet under the current system. Many centers have gone out of business over the years.

"Our redemption centers are starting to dwindle as the years have gone on there," Dawson said on Iowa Press. "And if we're going to have a recycling program, particularly for rural Iowa, there has to be a robust redemption center system out there."

The House and Senate plans each would give more money to redemption centers than the centers receive under the current law. The House bill would increase the redemption centers' 1-cent handling fee to 2 cents, while the Senate would increase it to 3 cents.

Schultz said boosting the handling fee to 3 cents would incentivize new or expanded redemption centers.

"I think if you triple the amount of money that goes into a certain sector, whether it’s cotton candy, a gun shop or a luxury car dealership, you’re going to get more of them," he said. "It happens that way."

Both the House and Senate bills would allow ways for retailers like grocery stores and convenience stores to opt out of taking back empty bottles and cans. The Senate's version would allow stores to stop accepting containers beginning July 1, 2023.

Current law requires them to accept the empty containers and return the 5-cent deposit paid by Iowans when they purchase pop or beer — but some stores have refused to take back the bottles and cans, in defiance of the law.

Lohse, who owns a local grocery store, called it "a food safety issue" for grocery stores to have to accept dirty containers, especially when stores serve fresh food.

"I will not get into — in public and online — the things that we have found in the cans and bottles that come into our store," Lohse said at a committee meeting last week.

Rep. Mary Wolfe, D-Clinton, was one of three Democrats to vote against the House proposal in the Ways and Means Committee last week. She said the bill seems to address grocery stores' flouting of the requirement that they accept empty containers by doing away with the requirement altogether.

"It seems like we are somewhat rewarding them for getting away with it for so long," she said.

Republicans like Dawson and Lohse have said they'd like to see mobile redemption centers where Iowans can return containers, scan a code and have money deposited in their accounts. The Senate bill contains language to set up those systems, which would be allowed to return Iowans' 5-cent deposit to them within 10 days rather than immediately.

But Senate Democrats said they don't believe those programs will end up being accessible for all Iowans.

"Those are expensive, and they’re only going to work in areas where you have a high volume of cans," Dotzler said. "You’re not going to invest in a mobile unit and take it and put it in a rural Iowa area and expect that to be profitable, so I don’t see those as being the answer to this."

Sen. Tom Shipley, R-Nodaway, said his ears "popped up" when he heard that.

"I’m the smallest market area that you can imagine," he said, referring to Adams County in southwest Iowa. "In my little county, they’re already looking at this system. They started looking at this system months ago."

The Senate's bill would also require proof of identification when someone returns more than 2,000 cans, to ensure people aren't crossing state lines to obtain the 5-cent deposit.

And it would reduce the per-barrel beer excise tax from 5.89 cents to 4.3 cents, which is expected to reduce state revenues by about $4.3 million annually, according to an estimate from the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency. Senators did not give a reason for making the change.

Polling shows the bottle bill is popular

A February poll of Iowa's active registered voters conducted by Selzer & Co. and commissioned by Cleaner Iowa found the bottle bill remains popular in Iowa. Eighty-four percent of respondents said they believe the program has been good for Iowa, while 12% said they believe it has been bad for the state.

The poll found 86% of Iowa voters favor expanding the number of places bottles and cans can be returned, and 72% favor increasing the 1-cent handling fee for redemption centers and stores.

The poll also found 71% support expanding the law to cover plastic bottles for water and sports drinks, and 51% support increasing the 5-cent deposit to 10 cents. Neither option is being considered in the House and Senate proposals this year.

"Unfortunately, it has been so drained, so exhausted over time without legislative attention that expansion is not an option right now," Schultz said of the law. "We do not have the infrastructure, we don’t have the redemption centers to handle an additional load."

The poll also found 62% of voters said all stores that sell containers covered by the law must accept customers' return of the containers, compared to 34% who said stores should not have to accept returns if they feel it would affect the food they sell.

Stephen Gruber-Miller covers the Iowa Statehouse and politics for the Register. He can be reached by email at sgrubermil@registermedia.com or by phone at 515-284-8169. Follow him on Twitter at @sgrubermiller.

The Man Who Reinvented Meth

Thomas Gounley

News-Leader

John Cornille had been with the Drug Enforcement Administration for seven years. Yet he couldn't wrap his head around what his informant was describing.

It was November 1992, and the man was talking about a visit to a home in Reeds Spring, Missouri. He said he'd been forced at gunpoint to use methamphetamine manufactured there. But something was off. The informant didn't mention beakers, flasks, Bunsen burners — none of the complex glassware Cornille was taught were part of meth labs.

Instead, the informant reported an unusual scene: Black trash bags stuffed with empty boxes of cold medicine. A mason jar full of kerosene, with something resembling a hockey puck settled at the bottom. Starter fluid. And a cookie sheet in the oven, with a yellowish cake on it.

Cornille, like other DEA agents, had made meth himself, under controlled circumstances, as part of his official duties. It was standard practice; the agency knew it meant he'd have more credibility when he asked a court for a search warrant or filled out a probable cause statement recommending criminal charges. It was important that prosecutors see him and other agents as experts on the manufacturing of illegal drugs.

As Cornille sat down to request a warrant for the Reeds Spring home, he couldn't be that authoritative. He needed another source, someone who could credibly link common household items with the production of meth, a highly-addictive substance known for its energy boost. He called a chemist working for the DEA in Chicago.

“I still remember what he said, because I wrote it down word for word," Cornille recalled in a recent interview. "He said, ‘There’s a basis for such a formula in literature, but it’s not been seen in the United States."

It's been nearly 25 years since the investigation, but that's not the only comment that remains lodged in Cornille's memory.

At some point, as the informant was describing the unusual lab in Reeds Spring, Cornille asked him if the meth was any good. If the answer was no, he figured, the situation might not be that big a deal. Low-quality stuff was unlikely to spread.

The informant, however, had five words for him:

"Best dope I ever had."

Three months later, in Springfield, Cornille sat across from a recently-arrested 49-year-old man.

With a voice recorder rolling, Cornille introduced himself for the record, then moved on to his guest.

“With me today is Mr. Bob Paillet,” Cornille said, according to a transcript. “Mr. Paillet has agreed to talk to me and explain to me different methods of manufacturing methamphetamine. One using the sodium metal and anhydrous ammonia and then a couple others.”

Cornille told Paillet — pronounced “Pie-ay” — that he wanted "just to sit down and talk to you about those different methods."

"How you discovered them, and so forth,” Cornille said.

Paillet began by saying he'd always been interested in chemistry and physics and that he'd "just played around with my chemistry set." Then he got detailed. He talked about molecules, replacement reactions and acetic acid, about catalysts, synthesis and hydroxyl groups. Scientific terms flowed with minimal prompting.

About halfway through the conversation, Paillet made a remark that fell somewhere between a suggestion and a prediction.

“You’re gonna have to send all your agents back to school and learn chemistry … There’s people out there that are going to great lengths to avoid getting caught,” he said.

Cornille responded. “Well, see I went to school to learn how to manufacture methamphetamine and to …”

Paillet cut him off.

“All the old ways,” he said.

Cornille joined the DEA in 1985 after serving on the local police force in Washington D.C. He spent the remainder of the decade in the nation's capital, fighting the crack epidemic. In 1990, he was transferred to southwest Missouri. At that point, Cornille recalls now, meth ranked about third on the agency's local priority list. Cocaine and marijuana were much more prevalent.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, however, the number of meth labs seized by the authorities drastically increased, first in Missouri, and gradually in other communities around the country. Before the decade was out, as the public and the media sought answers as to how the drug shifted from a problem to a crisis — how it grew powerful enough to ravage entire communities — law enforcement would point to Paillet by name.

"He brought it to life for this area," Springfield police Cpl. Dan Schrader told the News-Leader in 1998.

Paillet essentially converted the process of producing meth from a complex formula — one that required the so-called "cook" to have a chemistry background — to a simple recipe that could be followed by the masses. DEA and court records indicate Paillet taught his method to others, who in turn taught it within their own respective circles. The man behind the unusual meth lab in Reeds Spring learned the method from one of Paillet's friends, Cornille said.

Paillet wasn't a drug lord; he didn't control a network of associates. In fact, he did the opposite, spawning a generation of cooks by unintentionally democratizing an illegal industry. One textbook released in 2014 called Paillet "arguably the Johnny Appleseed for the spread of local meth production throughout the Midwest." Journalist Frank Owen, in his own book released in 2007, wrote that Paillet “effectively decentralized the local meth trade … broadening the appeal of the drug."

In other words, Bob Paillet reinvented meth.

How did he do it? The story he told law enforcement revolves around the Springfield campus of Missouri State University, which at the time was known as Southwest Missouri State.

“Bob claims he went to SMS’ library, and in a research manual he found this method of converting pseudoephedrine to methamphetamine using sodium metal as one of the catalysts," Cornille said. "He claimed that at the top of the page was a swastika.”

Thus the moniker: The new process was the "Nazi method." The new stuff, "Nazi dope."

“I really believe that his method, here in Springfield, was the bounce to get meth spread throughout the rest of Missouri and the United States," said Nick Console, who ran the DEA's Springfield office from the mid-1990s through the early 2000s.

Despite Paillet's pioneering role in an American drug epidemic, relatively little has been known about him. In the later years of his life, he appears to have avoided public scrutiny, as well as further trouble with the law. He died in Texas, age 72, on Jan. 1, 2016.

Paillet's death and the passage of time have obscured some details. Other key elements — like his recipe's alleged connection to the Third Reich — have taken on the characteristics of urban legend.

Court documents obtained by the News-Leader shed light on his arrest and the early spread of the Nazi method. Interviews with family members and a key associate, none of whom have previously spoken publicly, paint a picture of a man with an obsession who left public officials scrambling to respond for years.

The probable cause statement used to charge Paillet, written by Cornille, traces his arrival on law enforcement's radar to Jan. 24, 1993 — just over a week before he was arrested.

That day, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office arrested two Springfield residents, Christopher Fricks and Kimberly Lee Duncan, for possession of a controlled substance and possession of a short-barreled shotgun.

It's not clear from court documents how or why Paillet's name came up as the two were taken into custody. What is clear is that they told deputies of two places where Paillet stored materials he used to make meth.

The first was a room in a house Fricks was renting in Joplin. Authorities searched it on Jan. 28. The second was a property near the small town of Morrisville, where Paillet previously lived. One of his ex-wives allowed law enforcement on the property on Feb. 1. Both tips were substantiated.

Then, on Feb. 2, a Missouri State Highway Patrol trooper and Polk County deputies headed to Paillet's apartment on West 3rd Street in Battlefield. Paillet wasn't home, but his current wife was, and she began speaking to the men. She mentioned her husband would sometimes disappear for up to three weeks at a time, telling her he was working in Kansas City.

Midway through the conversation, Paillet drove up in a tan 1983 Chevy Cavalier. He walked inside, and set an unzipped black duffel bag on the floor. The grip of a pistol stuck out from the top, and the trooper quickly moved to secure the gun. It was loaded: Nineteen rounds, one in the chamber. Paillet said he'd traded for it.

The trooper and the deputies asked Paillet to talk outside. He said sure.

They walked out and the officers read Paillet his Miranda rights. According to court documents, Paillet “stated he was glad to see them and glad that it was over.”

Then he began to talk.

Standing outside his Battlefield, Missouri, home with a state trooper and several sheriff's deputies, Bob Paillet gave the men consent to search his vehicle.

He knew why they were there. Before they could open the door of his Chevy Cavalier, he told them what they'd find: methamphetamine, inside a small white pill bottle in the trunk. Once the drugs were retrieved, Paillet led the officers back inside and pointed out the two sawed-off shotguns under a bed.

The same day — Feb. 2, 1993 — the trooper and the Polk County deputies drove Paillet to the Missouri State Highway Patrol's regional headquarters on Kearney Street. There they were joined by John Cornille, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent based in Springfield.

Authorities found a note in Paillet's pocket, with a chemical formula written out. They also found two receipts, from trips to Walmart.

Shortly before dusk, after speaking with investigators, Paillet led the men to Room 431 of the American Inn Hotel in northeast Springfield, where he showed them the meth-making materials he had stashed there. Then they all drove across town to a storage facility in Battlefield, where he kept a second stash.

The News-Leader reported the bust two days later, with the headline "Police nail 'Nazi Dope' laboratory in Battlefield." The authorities said chemical disposal workers wearing special suits and protective gloves spent about three hours clearing the storage unit. They estimated disposing of the chemicals would cost the federal government $35,000.

The story noted that, nationwide, the number of meth lab busts had declined in recent years. But it also quoted the head of a local drug task force, with a premonition that would turn out to be spot on.

“This Nazi dope is definitely new to this area, and it could be the first in the U.S.,” said Steve Whitney, also the sheriff in nearby Christian County. “I still think we may see this more and more.”

Although credited with pioneering the so-called "Nazi method" of producing meth — and opening the door to an era of amateur meth labs across the Midwest — Paillet himself has remained something of a mystery.

News stories and a handful of books published in the decades since his 1993 arrest have presented scant detail: He moved from California to Missouri in the 1980s and, upon finding meth was more expensive than he was used to out west, set out to make it himself. He researched chemistry at the library at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield. He was arrested. He moved to Texas.

That narrative covers just a portion of his life.

Born on March 4, 1943, Robert Paillet was 72 when he died Jan. 1, 2016.

He left behind two daughters. In an email to the News-Leader, the oldest offered a theme for his biography:

"My father is a classic case of what PTSD does to a brilliant mind."

Speed. Crank. Dope. Ice. Zip. The poor man's cocaine.

Whatever you call it, meth is a stimulant that affects the central nervous system.

It's odorless, typically white and can be found in powder and crystal forms. In the United States, it has for decades been a schedule II substance, which means it has some very limited accepted medical uses — for conditions like attention deficit disorder and obesity, under the trade name Desoxyn — but also a high potential for abuse, as well as psychological or physical dependence.

One of the things that sets meth apart from other illegal substances is its means of production.

"Unlike other major drugs of abuse, methamphetamine is a synthetic drug, and as such, is manufactured in a laboratory," the DEA wrote in a 2016 report. "Methamphetamine does not rely on a plant as its main source and is not affected by drought, flooding, growth cycles, or other natural elements that affect production. Instead, methamphetamine production relies on the ability of traffickers to obtain precursors and other essential chemicals."

Meth is most commonly smoked, snorted or injected. Its use causes an increase in energy and alertness and a decrease in appetite. Meth also produces an intense euphoric rush, and can make users hypersexual. Cornille said the high from crack cocaine lasts for a matter for minutes. With meth, the high lasts for hours.

Meth can cause increased heart rate and blood pressure, tremors and convulsions and — particularly with repeated use — depression and motor and cognitive failure. Users also tend to not sleep for extended periods, which leads to additional detrimental effects.

Bob Paillet's death certificate lists his birthplace as San Diego. His oldest daughter, now 48, said her father was actually born on Canada's Vancouver Island, although his parents had previously lived in California.

Lisa Paillet — who spoke to the News-Leader on the condition that her real first name not be used — said Bob's father, Francis "Fred" Paillet, was a Vermont native and worked as a carpenter and master gardener. His mother, Quebec native Louise Marie Paillet, was a maid and cook.

The family moved to Fort Smith, Arkansas, when Bob was in junior high, then to the small town of Exeter, Missouri, about 60 miles southwest of Springfield, several years later. After graduating from Exeter High School in 1961, Bob enlisted in the Navy and was sent to California's Bay Area. He was taking forestry classes at the University of California-Berkeley when, in 1964, he was deployed to Vietnam on the aircraft carrier USS Ranger.

Lisa said her father returned to the United States with "debilitating migraines and a jaundiced view of the world," after a commanding officer "rode one of his crew members so hard" that he committed suicide. She believes Bob had post-traumatic stress disorder, although he was never formally diagnosed. For the most part, Lisa said, her father avoided talking about his time at war.

Upon his return home in 1965, Bob Paillet married Lisa’s mother, whom he met in Berkeley prior to his deployment. They briefly lived in Oakland before embarking on a year-long trip around the United States, ultimately ending in Kansas City. Over the next five years, Bob and his wife bounced back and forth between there and the Bay Area. Bob never returned to college.

Lisa was born in California in 1968. She said her father had an assortment of jobs over the years. Sometimes he flipped houses, or built new ones. He liked to purchase and restore antique cars, a lifelong passion of his, for resale. He wasn't always self-employed, however. When Lisa was born, he worked as a lineman for the phone company.

Around 1970, the family of three was living in Kansas City, where Bob worked for a fiberglass company. One day, he saw a friend and co-worker get electrocuted. It's a moment that "damaged" her father, Lisa said.

The family moved back to California, where Bob reconnected with a friend who was using meth. At some point, Lisa said, the friend got hold of a bad batch and became sick.

"So my father went to the Berkeley public library and the university library and started researching chemistry books," Lisa said.

Why chemistry books? Bob "wanted him to have clean drugs."

"That’s my father’s logic," she said. "Not get him off the drugs — but make them better.”

Within a few years, Lisa said, Bob became "really flaky and moody." Around 1973, at Bob's request, Lisa's mother gave her husband a year to travel and find himself. He took two. When Bob came back, the couple divorced.

"After that, I saw him off and on for camping trips, hiking, or things like roller skating," Lisa said. "It was a good compromise. I got to see him when he was in the mood to play. If he was not, he was not around. This basic relationship carried us through life."

The extent to which Bob used or produced meth in the ensuing years is unclear. Sometime during the two-year break, Lisa said, Bob met the woman who would become his second wife. His youngest daughter, Gena Paillet, was born in the Springfield area in 1978.

"I can remember I grew up terrified of him, because he would be one happy person one minute and literally in a second go to this terrifying person," Gena said.

By the time he was arrested with methamphetamine in the trunk of his car in 1993, Bob Paillet was on his third marriage.

He had fathered two children, born 10 years apart, in different states, to different women. The lives of his daughters, to this day, have had relatively little overlap.

Both women, however, have memories of living with their father on a plot of rural land along Highway JJ, not far from Morrisville, Missouri. The town of about 400 is 25 miles north of Springfield.

The remote venue in the anonymous rolling hills of the Ozarks appears to have been one place where Paillet refined the work that would later turn the meth trade on its head.

Gena Paillet, Bob's youngest daughter, lived there in the mid-1980s. She and her father had recently moved back to Missouri from California. Her mother, Bob's second wife, stayed behind in the Golden State for a year to work. Gena and her father lived in a modified school bus while Bob began building a house.

It was a simple setting. The bathroom for a time was an outhouse. But the property gave Gena, who says she grew up fearing her father, what she calls "some of the best memories of my life." There were dense woods to explore, and the property abutted the Little Sac River.

“We’d go swimming in that all the time and catch crawdads, things like that," Gena said. "I’ve thought about going back to that property."

Within a couple years, however, Bob and his second wife separated. Gena said her father was unfaithful and verbally abusive. She and her mother went to live in Morrisville.

Not long after, in 1987, Bob's oldest daughter, a product of his first marriage, arrived at the property.

Lisa Paillet — the first name is a pseudonym — grew up in California, where she was born in 1968. She saw her father only occasionally, but at times felt his presence even when he wasn't around. In high school, Lisa said, adults would sometimes show up and "imply that they knew my father and were supposed to watch out for me.”

Lisa came to live with her father as she prepared to attend Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield. He was footing the bill.

Three decades later, Lisa remembers the property as a place where her father experimented. Bob never said exactly what he was doing, and Lisa sensed it might be best if she didn't exactly know. She recalls helping her father hook together motors and going on shopping trips to Walmart to buy cold medicine.

"He would buy tons of that stuff, and he said it was easy for him to break down to get the chemicals he wanted," Lisa said.

Bob coached Lisa not to give her name to people. If somebody came looking for her father, she was supposed to deny that she knew him. Instead of guard dogs, the property near Morrisville had guard geese. The animals tend to raise a racket when they're disturbed.

"If you heard the geese and it was dark outside, you hit the lights and you hit the floor,” Lisa said.

There is some overlap in Lisa and Gena's memories. Both recall a room on the property where they weren't supposed to go. Gena distinctly remembers hiding behind a tree one day, on a weekend visit sometime after her parents separated, and watching her father go inside.

"I just remember seeing this one huge table ... with beakers and pots and things smoking and, you know, tubes going from one to the other," she said. "I didn’t know what it was, but I knew he was up to something. And by his behavior becoming much more erratic, we knew something was wrong. We just didn’t know what.”

By the 1980s, the U.S. meth trade — both manufacturing and distribution — was largely run by outlaw motorcycle gangs. In some places, it was the Hell's Angels. In Texas, it was the Bandidos.

Nick Console, a Louisiana native now living in Ash Grove, joined the DEA in 1983, and was soon working out of the agency's Houston office.

In an interview, Console said that meth labs back then were primarily located in out-of-the-way, rural areas, so the rotten egg smell produced during a cook wouldn't give the operation away. They were full of glassware, not unlike a scene from the hit TV series "Breaking Bad." The labs churned out batches of the drug measured in pounds.

Busts by the authorities would sometimes lead to shoot-outs. At times, cleaning up a lab consisted of dumping the chemicals in the nearest ditch, Console said. The Environmental Protection Agency had yet to sound the alarm. Nobody thought to wear a respirator.

“These labs, they were out in west Texas, they might be out in the boonies in an old mobile home, but everything in that mobile home was a lab," Console said.

Meth was big business for the bikers, and it required a specialized workforce, he said. The gangs employed their own chemists, who generally used what is known as the P2P method, in reference to its incorporation of phenylacetone, a chemical often used for industrial cleaning or photo processing purposes.

Back then, Console said, “you had to be a chemist to make meth.”

The meth trade's biker era bled into southwest Missouri. In 1987, Glennon Paul Sweet, a local member of the Hell's Angels-affiliated Galloping Goose motorcycle club, gunned down Highway Patrol Trooper Russell Harper during a routine traffic stop just outside Springfield. It was later determined Sweet, who was ultimately put to death, was transporting meth.

The wooded hollows of southern Missouri once attracted moonshiners. By the late 1980s, the region's rural nature and sparse law enforcement presence were seen as ideal for making meth. DEA officials reported that manufacturers were buying or leasing farmhouses and converting them into P2P labs. Still, they were few and far between; Cornille said agents typically came across a couple of labs per year.

After being transferred from Houston, Console worked for the DEA overseas in Turkey, then in San Francisco. In the fall of 1994, about a year and a half after Paillet's arrest, he arrived in Springfield as the DEA's new resident agent in charge.

“When I got here, it was the beginning of the spike in meth labs," he said.

Lisa Paillet doesn't believe her father was ever in a motorcycle gang. But Bob definitely associated with some shady types.

"I know that when I was in circles of people that I would consider very bad people, he was known in California,” she said.

Lisa also said her father "would have hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash sometimes, and then he would have nothing."

Either way, Paillet had no prior criminal record when, in January 1993, he became a person of interest to law enforcement agencies in southwest Missouri. The authorities had encountered a new type of meth lab — using what became known as the "Nazi method" — in the town of Reeds Spring just a couple months earlier.

In DEA records reviewed by the News-Leader, Paillet said he was the one who discovered the new process, but never specifically stated when that happened. Evidence suggests, however, that it was years before his arrest.

The Reeds Spring lab wasn't the first of its kind. A Nazi method-style lab was found in 1988 in a trailer park in Vacaville, California, according to a 1990 article in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. Authorities later came to believe Paillet was behind the lab — a conclusion that appears supported by his numerous connections to the state.

The Nazi method starts with the compound pseudoephedrine, which, chemically speaking, is one oxygen atom removed from methamphetamine. Pseudoephedrine is the active ingredient in cold medicines sold under brand names such as Sudafed.

Here’s how a former DEA chemist described the ensuing process:

To make meth, the manufacturer pulverizes the pseudoephedrine pills in a coffee grinder, creating a fine powder that is placed in a coffee filter. Methyl alcohol, in the form of something like windshield washer fluid, is poured over it, and then evaporated out.

The cook then adds ether, anhydrous ammonia - a compound commonly used by farmers as fertilizer – and sodium metal or lithium metal, which can be stripped from commercial batteries. That produces a liquid called meth oil.

More ether is added, and the solution is put through another coffee filter. A bubbler is then used to convert rock salt and other material to hydrogen chloride gas, which converts the meth oil into a white powder. Meth.

The Nazi method is also sometimes referred to as the Birch method because it builds upon the Birch reduction, a reaction first reported in 1944 by the Australian chemist Arthur Birch.

The significance of the Nazi method was how simple it was. When DEA agent John Cornille gave talks to community members, he'd compare it to baking a cake.

“Bob made meth a recipe anyone could follow,” he said.

The Nazi method produced small amounts of the drug, not the big batches typically cooked up in rural "superlabs." But unlike previous manufacturing methods, Nazi dope didn't require an open heat source. It involved fewer steps, and took less time.

"From start to finish, you could probably do it in an hour," Cornille said.

Additionally, the chemicals involved were legal, and often easy to obtain. It takes hundreds of pseudoephedrine pills to make a half ounce of meth. But purchasing cold medicine in vast quantities didn't raise eyebrows in the early 1990s.

"At that time, if someone came in and bought 10 boxes of pseudoephedrine, Walgreens was happy," Cornille said.

Bob Paillet ordered a pecan waffle with extra butter and a glass of milk, then settled into the booth at a north Springfield Waffle House. He was wearing a wire.

After being arrested on Feb. 2, 1993, the Springfield-area resident told the authorities that he'd taught his new recipe for methamphetamine — the so-called "Nazi method" — to a friend. Now, less than 24 hours later, Paillet, 49, was killing time reading the newspaper, waiting for that man to arrive. Drug Enforcement Administration agent John Cornille and a Missouri State Highway Patrol trooper were listening from a van parked nearby.

"Hey, late as usual," Paillet said as Mike Poplawski, 34, arrived.

A transcript of the conversation that took place over breakfast — obtained from the DEA under the Freedom of Information Act — is heavily redacted, with Poplawski's comments completely blacked out.

By the time they parted ways, however, Poplawski had given Paillet 279 milligrams of meth, according to court documents. The wire caught everything.

The next day, Cornille and the trooper showed up at Poplawski's home on South Newton Street.

Poplawski was cooperative. He invited the officers in, and, when told there was an ongoing investigation that involved him, admitted that he cooked meth, according to court documents. He showed the trooper a baggie of the drug inside his wallet, and then took them to another apartment where he stored lab equipment and precursor chemicals.

Later, at the DEA office, Poplawski confirmed he'd been taught by Paillet how to make meth using the Nazi method.

In a recent interview, Poplawski, now 59, said he first met Paillet in 1979.

Rollerskating was the thing to do back then, and "we were both hotdoggers," Poplawski said, using a term for those fond of showing off. The pair — 35 and 21 years old — met at a north Springfield rink. Poplawski said they were among the first in the city to purchase jogger skates, basically tennis shoes with big, brightly-colored wheels.

Poplawski said he believes Paillet might've smoked a little pot back then, and he drank, but he didn't do anything harder. Then Paillet left for California. When he returned, he was into meth. And Poplawski was, too.

He attempted to describe his relationship with Paillet back then.

"Friend?" he said. "No. Associate. Close associate."

It's unclear from court records when Paillet taught Poplawski the Nazi method. Poplawski declined to clarify the timeline.

Poplawski did state that, sometime in 1992, there'd been what might be called a misunderstanding between the pair. Paillet asked Poplawski to stop giving meth to a mutual friend of theirs. Poplawski complied. The friend complained to Paillet, who by that point had forgotten his earlier directive and became angry at Poplawski. The two stopped talking.

Then six or eight months later, there was a phone call. And a request to meet at the Waffle House along North Kansas Expressway. From Poplawski's perspective, it seemed an effort to repair the rift.

Sitting in the living room of his east Springfield home, Poplawski briefly looked over the redacted transcript of the conversation that day. Some of it was small talk, he said. Mostly, Paillet was "crying about hurting, wanting some speed."

It's been nearly a quarter century since the conversation, and Poplawski doesn't have a single positive thing to say about Paillet.

The man was chauvinistic, he said. A shorter guy with "a big man's want for power," someone who walked around "like a bantam rooster." A guy who "hit on every woman that he come across, no matter what." And a man whose defining obsession — all speeders have one, Poplawski said — was "his process," the way he made his dope.

"He experimented on people," Poplawski said. "He’d change the formula a little bit and then give it to junkies he knew’d take it and ask no questions, and then watch their reactions. This is the guy that DEA worked with."

As Poplawski looked at the transcript, he wouldn't even agree with Paillet's remark that he showed up to the Waffle House late.

“I’m more on time than anybody I know,” he said.

The authorities didn't stop with Poplawski.

Shortly after 9 p.m. on July 26, 1993, Cornille and three other law enforcement officers parked their vehicles in rural Webster County, with a barn in sight. They were investigating the latest appearance of Nazi dope. Cornille remembers hearing coyotes howl.

"Having moved from D.C. to here, it was a bit of a change for me," he said.

Earlier in the day, an informant told a Springfield police detective that a man named Frank Wright was planning to cook meth at the barn, which was owned by an associate, Gary Davis. The men would start once the sun went down, the informant said, to take advantage of lower humidity levels. The informant indicated Wright drove a green Dodge van. It was parked by the barn.

Investigators would later learn that, earlier that afternoon, Davis heard that a friend with a similar vehicle was stopped by the DEA. Davis became nervous and told Wright to "burn the barn" if agents showed up.

Around 10 p.m., the van started up. It drove off the property, headed west. Cornille and the others followed and initiated a traffic stop.

Wright agreed to a search. The van was clean. But the officers found a cigarette pack with a small amount of meth on Wright himself. They read him his rights.

Wright admitted to the authorities that he was planning to cook meth, and said he was placing supplies inside the barn. It was to have been something of a trade, court documents indicate. Davis, in exchange for providing the setting for the cook, was to receive two "eight balls" — the term for an eighth of an ounce — and be allowed to assist in production, so as to learn the new method himself.

Wright was arrested. The barn, by all accounts, escaped unharmed.

Davis contacted the DEA a week later. He admitted to knowing about plans for the cook and said he'd participated in an earlier one.

Wright, in turn, contacted the DEA in mid-August. He said he'd been introduced to meth about 18 months prior when he was at Poplawski's home. Paillet showed up to deliver the drug. Wright said he started doing work on Paillet's vehicle, and his involvement gradually grew, until he was loading and unloading chemicals and driving Paillet around while he distributed meth.

Wright told the DEA that Poplawski taught him to make meth. He described it as a somewhat formal process that entailed assisting with three cooks. (Poplawski, in a recent interview, denied ever teaching anyone the Nazi method).

The hardest ingredient to obtain was sodium metal, Wright told the DEA, so he figured out a way to manufacture it himself, using lye, an electric stove, jumper cables and a 12-volt car battery.

How did Wright come up with the workaround? Perhaps his time with Paillet influenced him.

"In late June, 1993, or early July, 1993, Wright did research into the manufacture of sodium metal at Southwest Missouri State University," court documents say.

Paillet, Poplawski, Wright and Davis were indicted by a federal grand jury on Oct. 8. 1993, along with two others, Kenneth and Sybil Allen. Court documents say Poplawski sold meth to, and purchased meth from, the couple. The charge against Sybil Allen was later dropped.

None of them were rich, at least as far as the court knew. Financial affidavits indicate that Poplawski was the only one employed in a traditional sense, bringing home $280 a week. Paillet and the others were listed as self-employed or unemployed, with minimal assets.

Three of the men had a record. Poplawski had been convicted in 1978 of felony robbery in Phelps County. Two others had stealing and drug offenses.

The men all initially pleaded not guilty and bonded out of jail. Dates were set for jury trials. Behind the scenes, however, negotiations were being made for plea agreements.

Between mid-December and early January 1994, all five pleaded guilty to conspiring to manufacture and distribute meth. In exchange, additional charges against some of them, for physically manufacturing or possessing the drug, were dropped.

With Paillet and his co-conspirators rounded up, the authorities could have been excused for thinking they'd nipped the nascent meth-making boom in the bud. But they were soon disappointed. The recipe for Nazi dope was no longer a secret.

The inaugural class of those involved with "Nazi dope" was sentenced in Springfield in the spring of 1994.

There was Bob Paillet, who told authorities he was the pioneer behind the new meth labs popping up in southwest Missouri; Mike Poplawski, to whom Paillet taught his new method; Frank Wright, who said he learned it from Poplawski; Gary Davis, who arranged to learn it from Wright; and Kenneth Allen, who bought meth from, and sold meth to, Poplawski.

Allen, who tested positive for using drugs while on bond, was sentenced to three years probation.

Davis also used meth while on bond and traveled without permission out of the state. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

Poplawski was sentenced to nearly six years in prison.

If the sentencing guidelines at the time were followed, Wright would've faced something similar — between six to seven years behind bars. Prosecutors, however, told the judge he provided "substantial assistance" in the prosecution of Poplawski. So he was sentenced to about three years in prison, followed by a similar amount of probation.

Then there was Paillet, who received the best deal of them all.

Using the sentencing guidelines, prosecutors calculated Paillet's "total offense level" to be 31. That would correspond with nine to 11 years behind bars. The prosecutors, however, wrote that "defendant agreed to fully cooperate with the government." He was credited with assisting in obtaining the guilty pleas of the others: Poplawski, Allen, Wright and Davis.

Additionally, the prosecutors wrote that Paillet "provided significant information concerning the origin of this particular method of making methamphetamine."

"Defendant fully admitted that he first devised this method of making methamphetamine, and it was through him that the method was related to other 'cooks' in the southwest Missouri area," they wrote.

Paillet was sentenced to five years of probation. He also attended a drug treatment program. While there, he received a letter from his oldest daughter, living in California.

"Surprise, Surprise," she wrote. "If I would have known you could do things like that I would have asked for help with my chemistry homework."

Nearly a quarter century later, Poplawski doesn't understand how Paillet didn't spend a day in prison.

“This was the man that experimented on people, and the DEA worked with him," Poplawski said. "I’m a little burnt about that, still. It still rises my anger a bunch. Not that I was interested in working with them myself, don’t get me wrong, and not that I wasn’t involved, don’t get me wrong there. But I was not the man on top. I was not the man to hit for the heavy sentence.”

Poplawski was implicated when Paillet wore a wire to their meeting at a north Springfield Waffle House. Poplawski told the News-Leader the pair never spoke after that day, except for one comment when they found themselves in the same courtroom.

"No hard feelings," Paillet told the man who had once been his friend. Poplawski, flabbergasted, didn't respond.

"If I could’ve shot lightning out of my eyes, he’d have been a pile of flesh, a pile of ash, in a heartbeat," Poplawski said. "He just cost me five years. He cost me five years.”

There's something about calling a drug recipe the "Nazi method" that attracts attention.

A few days after Paillet was arrested in February 1993, the News-Leader wrote about the bust. A spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration was quoted saying that "people give their drugs all kind of names."

"Just because it was made by German soldiers during World War II and now is called 'Nazi drugs' has no meaning to us," the spokeswoman said. "It's a nothingness. It only means that the producers don't have to use the usual ingredients, that they can make it without the regular methods. It's dangerous, no matter what you call it or how you make it."

There's a problem with the spokeswoman's response — one that's been replicated in many subsequent discussions of the Nazi method. It implied there's a direct link between Paillet's recipe and the Third Reich. But is there? After reviewing the available evidence, the News-Leader found the connection, while compelling, is tenuous.

Researchers have delved into German use of meth during World War II. Temmler, a Berlin-based pharmaceutical company, introduced meth in pill form under the brand name Pervitin in 1938, according to a 2005 report in the news magazine Der Spiegel. By 1940, millions of pills were being shipped to the front lines, resulting "in a Blitzkrieg fueled by speed."

Germany wasn't alone in exploiting new substances with minimal consideration for side effects. The United States and British supplied service members with tablets of Benzedrine, an amphetamine, during the same period. Both were viewed as particularly valuable for pilots, who needed to remain alert on long bombing raids.

The large-scale manufacture of Pervitin pills in German factories, however, stands in stark contrast to Paillet's method, which resulted in small amounts of a powdered version of the drug. Which raises the question: If the method wasn't the same, how did meth produced in southwest Missouri end up referencing a fascist state?

In an interview, DEA agent John Cornille said that Paillet told him he learned the Nazi method by researching in the library at what was then Southwest Missouri State University. Cornille said Paillet indicated he came across a book or a document with a swastika on it.

Those two particular claims aren't found in the hundreds of pages of federal court and DEA records reviewed for this story. The DEA records, which were heavily redacted, do include one conversation in which Cornille asked Paillet if he looked "this stuff up in a book or something." The response, however, contradicts the notion that there was one all-important document.

"OK, I have a lot of books," Paillet said. "I have gone through the library, many libraries and read lots of books, hundreds of 'em. Ah, involving many phrases of chemistry."

Cornille asked what books "originally kinda gave you this idea that maybe this thing could work."

"I can’t say that it was any one in particular," Paillet responded.

Cornille told the News-Leader he believes most of the backstory Paillet gave regarding his discovery. However, he said the DEA tried to determine the exact book that contributed to Paillet's breakthrough, but came up empty-handed.

“I believe he found it in a book at SMS," Cornille said. "But the swastika thing — they looked far and wide.”

The man who did the searching says it's a little more complicated than that.

Terry Dal Cason retired from a 40-year-career as a forensic chemist with the DEA in 2011. He told the News-Leader that, back in the mid-1990s, his colleagues in the world of meth lab analysis didn't talk vaguely about a cook in southwest Missouri coming across a book or document with a swastika on it, as Cornille does now.

Instead, Dal Cason said, they specifically mentioned a "Nazi patent." Some of his colleagues stated as fact that the cook came across a patent that contained the exact recipe for Nazi dope. But Dal Cason wanted proof.

"People kept talking about this patent, and I was trying to get a copy of it," he said.

Dal Cason ended up with two theories. In 1997, he laid them out in an article for a little-known DEA publication called Microgram.

Theory one:

Dal Cason wrote that "one of the earliest groups" to make Nazi dope compiled packets of documents that included instructions for the method, and hid them away from their lab sites. If the lab was busted, the hidden packets insured they'd still have a written copy of the recipe somewhere, Dal Cason wrote.

What does that have to do with the name? "The top page of the synthesis 'packets' was a photocopy of a drawing from the cover of a video cassette case of the Third Reich propaganda film, 'Triumph des Willens,'" Dal Cason wrote.

"Triumph of the Will," the English translation of the title, was commissioned by Hitler. The drawing Dal Cason referred to shows an eagle clutching a wreath containing a swastika.

Dal Cason wrote in 1997 that "it is relatively easy to postulate how the seizure of these packets could present an opportunity to misinterpret a relationship between the most recognizable of NAZI symbols and the Li (or Na)/NH3 reduction procedure contained in the packets."

"From this point it is easy to imagine a 'word of mouth' genesis of the 'Nazi patent' myth," he wrote.

The documents and court records reviewed by the News-Leader do note materials seized in connection with the investigation of Paillet and his associates, but don't mention the German propaganda film. Dal Cason told the News-Leader he didn't recall the specific individuals who apparently hid the packets. The footnotes of his Microgram article reference cases filed in federal court in 1996, years after Paillet was arrested and the Nazi dope moniker was first used.

Theory two:

Dal Cason also asked a colleague in the United Kingdom to search German patents. Those published from 1932 to 1945 were topped with the "Imperial Eagle," a coat of arms depicting an eagle perched on wreath containing a swastika (similar, but not identical, to imagery on Triumph Des Willens).

Leslie King, head of the Forensic Science Service's Drugs Intelligence Laboratory, wrote Dal Cason in October 1996, and said he failed to find a patent for the technique Paillet used.

There were, however, patents that were somewhat related. Dal Cason said the packets mentioned in his first theory contained not just a recipe for the Nazi method, but also instructions for another process using methcathinone.

Dal Cason said King found a German patent from 1936 which provided techniques for synthesizing pseudoephedrine and ephedrine using methcathinone.

"The chemical names 'Ephedrinen' and 'Pseudoephedrine' are easily recognized among the German wording of the patent," Dal Cason wrote. "Misinterpretation of the patent's content, combined with a clandestine laboratory having chemicals appropriate for the Li(Na)/NH3 method, might easily lead to the assumption that this process was described in the patent."

To be clear, however, the patent wasn't describing the method Paillet used. And to Dal Cason's knowledge, no one ever found a copy of the German patent in connection with a lab bust — it's something for which Dal Cason had to search.

The audience for Microgram, where Dal Cason's article appeared, was largely limited to law enforcement. An editor's note attached to the piece read: "If anyone has hard evidence that a 'NAZI' patent does exist, please contact the Microgram editor." Dal Cason never heard from anyone.

Poplawski, for his part, offered a third theory.

In an interview, he said Paillet "wasn't smart enough to invent" the method, and that he must have gotten the recipe from someone else. Poplawski also said he never heard Paillet or any of his associates use the phrases 'Nazi method" or "Nazi dope."

“The first time we heard it the DEA threw it out there, and we had no idea what they were talking about,” he said.

Why does all this matter? Words stir emotion. Dan Viets — a defense attorney based in Columbia, Missouri — told the News-Leader that, by the late 1990s, prosecutors were brandishing the Nazi method moniker "as a weapon" in front of juries, taking advantage of the average person's extreme dislike of Nazis.

Viets considers the term "obviously prejudicial," particularly given the the lack of an established connection between Paillet's method and actual Nazis.

"The cops liked to say that as many times as they could in a courtroom," he said.

The sentencing of Paillet and his associates didn't stop use of the Nazi method.

Instead, the opposite occurred. The small-scale labs began to proliferate.

At first, most state and local officials, such as the average rural county sheriff's office, didn't have the training to safely deal with meth labs. Instead, they'd call the DEA. As the 1990s progressed, Cornille says he began feeling like a firefighter, rushing from small blaze to small blaze without time to investigate their causes. Instead of fires, of course, it was meth labs — although the explosions the labs sometimes prompted could end up blurring the distinction.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol, contacted by the News-Leader this fall, could only find records regarding the number of meth lab incidents in the state annually dating back to 1996. That year, according to the patrol, there were 121 labs found.

That figure increased to 319 in 1997. Then 480 in 1998. Then 615 in 1999.

"Once everything got rolling, it spread like wildfire," said Nick Console, who led the DEA's Springfield office for about a decade starting in 1994.

(A meth lab doesn't have to be operational when it is discovered to be counted in state or federal tallies of "meth lab incidents." Those tallies generally also count situations when authorities seize materials used to make meth, or find sites where lab waste material has been discarded.)

Cornille said he recalls Paillet telling him that he taught five people his method for Nazi dope.

“My initial thought was if we could get those five, we could make an impact," Cornille said. "But it didn’t work. Maybe we didn’t get one or we didn’t get to them fast enough.”

Console said he spent the mid-to-late 1990s trying to warn DEA leadership in Washington D.C. that what was happening in southwest Missouri was a serious situation, one that could get worse if unchecked. He says the leaders didn't feel a sense of urgency.

"We’re trying to tell them — it’s not heroin, it’s not cocaine," Console said. "It’s not a major organization, like a biker gang, that’s producing large amounts of methamphetamine. It’s Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith down here, and the Johnsons over here, making a half ounce. In their eyes, that wasn’t a problem. That was a local problem. It wasn’t a national problem."

The spread of the Nazi method meant that a drug once manufactured in large quantities by "superlabs" situated away from populated areas was now being produced on a small scale within towns and cities.

Console said he can tell stories all day about unusual busts.

There was the time agents executed a search warrant and noticed bullet holes in the ceiling of a bedroom. When they asked the home's resident why, the man said he knew the agents were monitoring him from his attic, so he shot at them while he laid in bed. The agents hadn't been to the house previously.

“Think about being up without sleep for seven days," Console says. "Think about it. Where would your mind be, where would your body be? So they’d become very paranoid.”

There was the man in Joplin whose lab exploded, the force of it enough to embed sodium metal in his skin. Sodium metal reacts when it comes in contact with water. When someone went to clean the man's body with a saline solution at the hospital, the sodium metal exploded — the "pops" sounding like a miniature fireworks display.

Then there were the deformed chickens. Agents responded to a farm in Christian County where large tanks of anhydrous ammonia were buried in the barn. The stuff wasn't being used as fertilizer.

"He had chickens with double beaks, he had chickens that were a foot growing out of another foot," Console said. "All the chemicals they were using — they were making meth there for a long time — were being dumped all over the area where the chickens were being raised.

In 1998, the man credited with pioneering the so-called "Nazi method" of methamphetamine production was contacted by a News-Leader reporter.

Bob Paillet had moved to Texas from southwest Missouri several years prior, not long after being sentenced for conspiring to manufacture and distribute the drug. He was still on probation.

It appears to be Paillet's only published interview. He expressed regret to reporter Laura Bauer.

"I never thought it would spread like this," he said. " ... I don't travel in those circles anymore."

In the years after his arrest, Paillet also wrote several letters to — and once spoke on the phone with — John Cornille, the Drug Enforcement Administration agent who investigated him.

"I can remember him expressing remorse that he had started 'this mess,' as he referred to it," Cornille said.

By the turn of the new millennium, Nazi dope was no longer a Missouri-specific phenomenon.

In north Texas, the commander of an 11-county narcotics task force told a magazine in 2001 that the unit came across its first Nazi lab three years prior. By the following summer, the task force was busting one every week.

"It has exploded on the scene so quick, it's so easy to do, and there are so many people involved in manufacturing it, that it has completely overtaxed our capabilities," the commander said.

In Illinois, a state police representative said in November 2000 that meth labs were "getting to the epidemic stage." He cited the fact that the state was on track to have 400 lab busts by the end of the year. Within four years, Illinois would be logging more than 1,500 labs annually.

In California, the Modesto Bee reported in 2000 that officials in the Central Valley had encountered eight labs using the Nazi method, and that "five of them were traced to a man from Missouri who had moved into a trailer park near Fresno and was teaching this method."

Officials in numerous other communities around the country reported a version of the same thing.

Nick Console, the former head of Springfield's DEA office, said top agency officials did little to respond to the growth in small-scale labs in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, he said, that began to change, as politicians representing affected communities began putting pressure on the agency.

“It took ‘em a good eight to 10 years," Console said. "And the damage was already done, it’d already spread.”

The Nazi method didn't just spread cook to cook. Its rise coincided with the early days of the modern internet and anonymous forums like The Hive, where users traded information about illegal substances.

"There were a number of really good dope sites," said Terry Dal Cason, a retired DEA forensic chemist who investigated the origins of the Nazi method moniker.

Since 2002, the DEA has published an annual report called the "National Drug Threat Assessment," which details the prevalence of illegal drugs in the United States.

Each year, the agency asks various state and local law enforcement agencies what they consider the "greatest drug threat" in their community. In 2003, 33.1 percent of agencies selected cocaine. Methamphetamine was second, with 31 percent.

The report stated that meth was widely available in the western and central United States and gradually becoming more available in the eastern United States. It concluded, however, that “despite the rising threat, methamphetamine is not likely to surpass the overall threat posed to the United States by powder cocaine and crack in the near term.”

Two years later, it did.

The 2005 report read: "According to state and local law enforcement agencies, the threat associated with methamphetamine trafficking and abuse has increased sharply since 2002 and now exceeds that of any other drug."

To be clear, the Nazi method wasn't the only way meth consumed in America was produced. In its annual reports, the DEA largely focused on other sources.

First, there was the foreign supply; meth was smuggled into the United States from Mexico and, to a much lesser extent, southeast Asia.

Then there were the domestic "superlabs" — those capable of producing 10 pounds of meth in a single day. In 2001, federal authorities seized 303 of them, two-thirds of which were located in California. The California labs alone likely produced more meth than all other domestic laboratories combined, the DEA wrote.

There was regional variation, however. In 2002, the agency wrote that "local independents account for as much as 80 percent of retail methamphetamine distribution in some areas of the country,” specifically the central United States. The Nazi method was a key process used, but there were also other recipes, like the "Red-P" method named for the required red phosphorous.

The DEA struggled to accurately detail the problem. In 2004, the agency wrote that meth use and distribution in the Midwest was "very high" in rural and suburban areas, but "less so in metropolitan areas, where most drug consequence data are collected."

"Therefore, available drug consequence data for methamphetamine use in the Central States likely under-represents the problem, perhaps significantly," the agency wrote.

Small labs accounted for much of the drug's impact on communities, which was felt in burn units and mental health clinics, courtrooms and cemeteries. While the Nazi method simplified meth production, it didn't make it foolproof. The more labs, and the more cooks, the more opportunities for something to go wrong, and the greater the cost of cleanup.

In 2003, there were 361 reported fires and explosions at meth lab sites, and 255 law enforcement officers were injured responding, according to the DEA. The agency spent $16.3 million on laboratory cleanup that fiscal year, eight times more than it spent less than a decade earlier.

That same year, the DEA reported that 893 children were present when meth labs were seized. About two-thirds tested positive for toxic levels of chemicals in their bodies. The agency said "child neglect and abuse are common within families whose parents or caregivers produce or use methamphetamine."

“The devastation and the damage to kids … I understand why Bob had regret," Cornille said.

Nationwide, meth lab busts peaked in 2004, when there were nearly 24,000 seizures.

Almost 3,000 of them were in Missouri. Two years earlier, the number of meth lab busts in the state passed those in California — the birthplace of the methamphetamine industry — for the first time. Since then, Missouri has led the nation most years, never dropping below third in annual busts. In some parts of the country, the area code for southwest Missouri, 417, is said to be slang for meth, or a particular type.

Cornille and Console both acknowledge that if Paillet hadn't introduced the Nazi method, someone else might have done so a short time later. Just like any legal industry, there is a steady pace of innovation in the world of illegal drugs, typically in response to some government crackdown.

To combat meth in the early 2000s, laws were implemented requiring medications containing pseudoephedrine to be sold from behind the counter. In 2007, fewer than 7,000 meth labs were seized across the country.

But makers and users adjusted, developing what became known as "one-pot" or "shake-and-bake" meth production, in which just a couple of pseudoephedrine pills are mixed in a 2-liter soda bottle for smaller batches. The new method led to another spike — 15,000 national meth lab busts in 2010.

Console said he views these newer methods as just continued innovation. The Nazi method was the truly critical shift, he said — the one that turned meth consumers into producers.

After they were sentenced for conspiring to manufacture and distribute meth, those indicted alongside Paillet struggled to stay on the right side of the law.

Kenneth Allen, who was given three years probation, ended up behind bars after he repeatedly tested positive for meth; he was also arrested for driving with a revoked license and failing to support his dependents.

Michael Poplawski, sentenced to nearly six years in prison, later completed community service for patronizing a prostitute in the early 2000s, according to online court records. He pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana, with intent to distribute, in 2012.

Gary Davis, sentenced to five years in prison, briefly escaped in August 1994 from the Kansas facility where he was incarcerated. His sentence was later reduced for aiding in the prosecution of two others, but he ultimately ended up back behind bars. Davis is currently serving time in a federal penitentiary in Texas for, among other things, stealing explosive materials and conspiring to use them to rob a bank, according to a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Court records indicate that Paillet never violated parole. There is no evidence he got in trouble with the law during the rest of his life.

Paillet found work after he moved to Texas in the mid-1990s. His youngest daughter said he was a CNC programmer, developing the programs that run automated machining equipment. His oldest daughter, however, said Paillet did sales and technical installations for a company.

By the end of the decade, health problems prompted him to go on disability, and he talked about having dystonia, a neurological disorder characterized by uncontrollable and sometimes painful muscle spasms.

Court records indicate Paillet divorced his third wife in 2008. He spent the final years of his life living with another woman in a trailer park in Sherman, a city of about 40,000 an hour north of Dallas.

In 2014, Stephanie Denton, 37, moved into the unit next to Paillet. Within a few months, she and Paillet — now in his early 70s — were drinking coffee together every morning.

Denton was having issues in her relationship, and her son was having legal troubles; Paillet encouraged her to be more positive, she said. From what Denton could tell, her neighbor didn't really have close friends.

Paillet didn't talk about his past very much, Denton said. She knew he was a Vietnam vet — Paillet talked about the war being pointless — and that he'd been involved with drugs to a degree. She said he claimed he'd sold drugs to raise money for a school for disabled kids.

Paillet was more inclined to talk about the government, with a bent more paranoid than partisan. Denton said he repeated a well-known conspiracy theory that claims the Federal Emergency Management Agency plans to imprison citizens in camps after the imposition of martial law. Paillet's minimal online presence included posts about a group advocating for the secession of the state of Texas.

Paillet also had an extensive rock collection and talked and posted online about searching for gold on a claim in Colorado. He appears to have become obsessed with the process, not unlike his days of manufacturing meth.

“He first really started talking about gold mining after he was arrested," his oldest daughter Lisa Paillet said. "One of the things that he was really very interested in doing was separating gold from rock, so not mining in the river, but using chemistry to remove gold from rock without requiring massive amounts of water."

Lisa said her father's health issues worsened during the final years of his life, and that he appeared to be struggling with dementia at times. In what would end up being her last conversation with her father, he talked about his will.

Bob Paillet didn't leave a suicide note.

Early in the afternoon of Jan. 1, 2016, the 72-year-old drove his red Dodge truck from the mobile home park where he lived in Sherman, Texas, to a nearby hospital. It was a little over a mile. Then, he took a gun — "he had a lot of guns," said his daughter Gena — walked to the front of the vehicle, and shot himself in the head. He died minutes later in the emergency room.

Paillet's family held a memorial service after his death. To the outside world, however, the only acknowledgement of his passing can be found on the website of a Denison, Texas, funeral home. It's not really an obituary, just a name and a pair of dates.

There's a guest book option on the site. One person — Paillet's second wife, Gena's mother — has left a message: "We had a lot of happy years together. You will be missed. Your pain is over, ours now begins."

Otherwise, there was nothing in the public record acknowledging that the man credited with reinventing methamphetamine production in the U.S. was dead. All in all, it probably turned out about how Paillet would have wanted it.

In 1998, he spoke briefly with a News-Leader reporter, the only time he was ever quoted in the media. At the time, meth lab busts were drastically increasing across the central United States. Authorities were blaming the phenomenon on the ease of the "Nazi method," and said Paillet pioneered it while living in the Springfield area.

In that interview, Paillet expressed regret, as well as a wish regarding his future.

"I hope my name is forgotten or it's put in the back of people's minds," he said.

Perhaps Paillet found some measure of peace. In an interview, Gena said that, while growing up, she was not allowed to talk or ask about the concept of a God around her father. In his later years, however, Bob Paillet softened on that view.

In 2008, he wrote on online message boards that "I was an atheist, then agnostic, and now I believe that there is a God." He also said that he believed in evolution, and expressed a degree of incredulity that there are individuals who do not.

"He was still a scientific man, but he found his version of God,” Gena said.

Gena, 38, came of age in a world that her father helped create.

Growing up in Morrisville, she "never really fit in," she said, and started drinking at an early age. When Gena and her mother moved to Springfield, she "immediately just fell in with the wrong crowd." She graduated from Springfield's Parkview High School in 1996.

"A lot of people believe that addiction is genetic," Gena said. "I am my father's daughter, not just in that way, but every way that there is."

Gena said she used meth for the first time at age 15. Two years later, she met Steven Joseph Brown, the man who would become her husband.

"He used needles, and he shot me up for the first time with heroin, and it was pretty much over from there," she said. "It was always either that or meth. There was like a two-year period where I probably never slept. It’s been a struggle for me ever since."

Brown — who died in February 2016 — was 16 years older than Gena. Prior to meeting her, he gave Gena's father precursor chemicals in exchange for meth, she said. At one point, he was even arrested by John Cornille, the Drug Enforcement Administration agent who investigated Bob.

“My husband kind of ended up learning my dad’s recipe," Gena said. "Not anywhere near as good as my dad.”

Gena, who said she grew up fearing her father, first got in trouble for drugs when she was 17. She thought her father was going to kill her. Instead, she said, he "became my best friend ever, because we understood each other."

"My mom — I love my mom — she’s never done a drug in her life," Gena said. "She’s had maybe one speeding ticket, and I think she even got that dismissed. Really this connection grew between him and me that was just amazing. I could really do no wrong in his eyes.”

Gena said that between her late teens and late 2015, she was only "clean" for extended periods twice, when she became pregnant. "But I always went pretty much right back."

In late December 2015, Gena said, she overdosed on heroin. Gena's mother, who she lived with at the time, kicked her out of her house. Gena called her father, who paid for a motel room for a week, and indicated she should come live with him in Texas.

"He said, 'I want you to go to your parole officer and start getting everything transferred down here and I want you to come back here,' and he said, 'I will get you through this,'" Gena said.

Two days later, she got the call that her father was dead.

Gena said she traveled to Texas to attend her father's memorial service, but got in a dispute with the woman Bob was living with at the time of his death, and ended up leaving beforehand (Lisa Paillet described her half-sister as "high as a kite" at the time). Gena expressed regret that she didn't receive something her father wanted her to have — "this metal container thing that his very first successful batch of stuff was made in.”

In August, Gena said she put herself through treatment after returning from Bob's memorial service. She said she had been clean since Jan. 25.

"It really hurts me that my dad never got to see me get my life together," she said.

By November, however, Gena was back in a three-week rehab program. She attributed the relapse to her depression, and said she "wasn’t managing it with medication like I should have been." In early May, she said she had stayed clean since completing the program.

"It’s still hard a lot of days," Gena said. "And it’s hard to stay away from the people that kind of want to push it on you.”

Lisa Paillet, who asked that her first name be changed for this story, graduated in 1991 from then-Southwest Missouri State University with a degree in theater — which she said her father "paid for, I’m pretty sure, with drug money."

She returned to California, where she grew up, and gradually drifted away from theater-related work. When her father, then on probation in Texas, found a job that made machining equipment, he paid for her to go to school to get a machinist's certification. She was hired by a company she described as being in the military aerospace research sector, which paid for her to get a bachelor's degree in engineering.

“That’s when our conversations about science really took off, and we would talk for long periods of time,” she said of her father.

Regarding her sister, she said Gena's "world is very, very different from mine.”

“He and Gena had a very, very different relationship than he and I had ... I think he treated her far more like a child than he ever treated me," Lisa said. "And because he didn’t really raise me, he didn’t have rules for me … I think even though I went down his road a little bit when I was very young, I think my upbringing with my mother definitely was not the same.”

Lisa said her father's decision to take his own life wasn't entirely unexpected. Suicide was something he mentioned casually over the years, she said.

"He knew he was going to commit suicide if he ever got too sick, and I knew it a long time ago," Lisa said.

Bob Paillet's parents died in the 1980s. They are buried in a cemetery in Exeter, Missouri, where they lived and where Bob spent his high school years.

Lisa said her father, who became obsessed with gold mining in the later years of his life, requested his ashes be scattered at his gold claim. However, she's has been unable to find it. When Lisa called Colorado, she was told he didn't have a claim in the state.

Though Paillet appears to have avoided run-ins with the law late in life, the process he pioneered continued to occupy authorities.

Some states responded to the rise in small-scale meth labs by requiring prescriptions for purchase of products containing pseudoephedrine.

Missouri didn't, but over time dozens of communities within the state instituted their own prescription laws. City leaders in Springfield debated doing the same in 2013, but the effort wasn't without controversy.

That fall, Councilwoman Cindy Rushefsky — a former prosecutor who supported the measure — asked Springfield's police chief to provide monthly reports detailing meth lab activity in the city. She pitched it as a way for council to stay informed on the issue. Councilman Doug Burlison, a libertarian who opposed the prescription requirement, described it as "an attempt to educate us to have different opinions."

Then a funny thing happened. The police chief's monthly reports consistently described fewer and fewer meth labs being found in the city. In July 2014, the prescription bill was tabled indefinitely.

The situation wasn't unique to Springfield. The number of small meth labs seized in the United States has declined in recent years, from about 15,000 in 2010 to about 4,500 in 2016.

It's not that the drug has lost its presence in the United States. Last year, when state and local law enforcement agencies were asked to name the greatest drug threat in their area, heroin received the most votes. The agencies that selected it, however, were strongly concentrated in the Great Lakes and northeast regions of the United States. In the western part of the country, more agencies chose meth.

Most of that meth is produced in Mexico and smuggled across the border.

In a 2016 report, the DEA attributed the decline in domestic labs to the wide availability of high-purity, high-potency meth from Mexico, as well as the passage of the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, a federal law enacted in 2006 which placed restrictions on the meth precursors ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, and phenylpropanolamine.

Nick Console, who spent about a decade as the top DEA official in Springfield, said Paillet's Nazi method may have prompted the cartels to become more involved with production of meth.

"Why? Because you had a huge addiction problem here in the United States to methamphetamine," he said. "Supply and demand.”

Console retired to a farm in Ash Grove. John Cornille, the DEA agent most involved with investigating Paillet, still works for the agency.

Mike Poplawski — who was taught the Nazi method by Paillet himself — has served his prison sentence. He understands how the statute of limitations works, double jeopardy and all that.

Ask him about the early days of Nazi dope, however, and he chooses his words carefully. He's convinced that saying certain things could get the DEA interested in him again. He says he's been at the same job for 15 years, together with his wife for 25 years.

"I’ve got grandkids that love me, step-kids that love me, extended family that love me," he said. "You look from the other side — the law enforcement side — I’m a bad man.”

In an interview in his Springfield home, Poplawski, 59, said the people he considers meth's Nazi dope generation are "all in jail or dead," and that those currently involved with the drug aren't self-starters. He voiced frustration at seeing "bangers shooting each other, shooting up neighborhoods, doing dope and falling asleep in their cars with the kids in the cars and s---- like that."

"I want to go around with a .22 starter pistol and start capping people," he said. "I can still find the houses. They’re not the same houses. But a speeder can always recognize another speeder."

Asked about his own actions, Poplawski said "if I knew then what I knew now, I would’ve done things different."

"I like to think that I had the ability to make a change," he said.

At the same time, he said, "there's always going to be an addiction."

"The hole’s always there," Poplawski said. "And once it got filled by meth, we had the meth crisis ... Now you’ve got [a] prescription drug crisis and you’ve got [a] heroin crisis hard. Meth’s bad. I don’t think heroin’s an improvement."

Reached at a federal prison in Texas, Gary Davis — the only other individual indicted alongside Paillet still living — declined to be interviewed without compensation. In a brief email, he did include one comment.

"Meth is a scourge on society," Davis wrote. "I wish I would have never messed with it."

Paillet expressed similar sentiments years before his death.

"I wish I never started it," he told a News-Leader reporter in 1998. "I would never do it again."

"I caused a lot of trouble with a lot of people."

How we reported this story

Reporter Thomas Gounley began working on this story in the wake of Bob Paillet’s death in January 2016.

The events leading to the arrest of Paillet and his co-conspirators are detailed in federal court records. Additional information regarding Paillet was obtained from the Drug Enforcement Administration through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Interviews with Paillet’s family members and one-time associates, along with current and retired law enforcement personnel, were conducted between August 2016 and May 2017. One of Paillet’s daughters, citing concerns regarding how this story could affect future job prospects, agreed to be interviewed on the condition that her first name be replaced with a pseudonym. Editors agreed to that request.

The photos of Bob Paillet in this story were provided by his daughters. Booking photos of those indicted alongside Paillet were obtained from the Greene County Archives and Records Center. Center staff said they did not have a booking photo of Paillet himself.

Super Bowl ad trends: Sex, goofy guys, stars and cars

Bruce Horovitz, USA TODAY

Nine in 10 viewers are as interested in the commercials as the game

Two advertisers will air commercials that are two-minutes long

Celebrities will show up in swarms in some spots

Madison Avenue's 2013 Super Bowl efforts can be described in two words: eye candy.

That's not necessarily a good thing.

The commercials for Super Bowl 2013 are so overloaded with eye candy — sexy models, too-cute kids, wacky animals, magical happenings and effects — that by the time folks take them all in, many viewers will feel like they just swallowed the entire bag of Halloween candy in one sitting.

No room for the chips and dip.

That, of course, won't stop an estimated 111 million viewers from watching most of the 50-some TV spots from 30-some advertisers.

A new survey by Nielsen confirms that: 91% of consumers say they are as interested in watching the commercials as the game itself. At roughly $3.8 million per 30-second spot, Super Bowl marketers are expected to easily top last year's record of $262.5 million, reports Kantar Media.

And we will test them all on Sunday in the 25th Anniversary USA TODAY Ad Meter — a consumer rating of the game's ads — to see which ad tops them all.

Meanwhile, here are the top 10 trends to track as you watch the ads:

• Cars that empower. Maybe it's that new-car smell. Maybe it's the octane in the gasoline. Or maybe it's just Madison Avenue hyperbole on the ad world's biggest stage.

There's something about new cars in this year's Super Bowl commercials that seems to utterly embolden whoever is driving them — or even just sitting in them — to do things they never would otherwise.

Take the Audi spot. A high school kid goes dateless to the prom. Even his little sister pokes fun at him. But then his dad hands him the keys to the Audi — the hot S6 performance model — and everything magically changes. He drives to prom and brazenly pulls into the school principal's parking spot. Once on the dance floor, he bravely kisses the prom queen — even with her boyfriend (prom king) watching. OK, it costs the kid a black eye, but, heck, he drives off in his Audi with prom queen in tow.

In a Hyundai spot, a kid is moved to strategically take on the neighborhood bully.

Then, there's spunky VW. Its new commercial takes place in a dysfunctional office that has but a single, happy worker. Turns out the key to his happiness also is the key to his VW. Turns out that his happiness is contagious — so long as you sit with him in his VW.

• Sex still sells. Sex never gets old on the Super Bowl.

It just gets weird.

Advertisers are fully aware that the single simplest way to snatch the attention of jaded male or female viewers is to show a sexy babe or dude. Or, in this year's oddest version, show a supermodel passionately kissing a computer geek.

That's what Go Daddy has in store, with Bar Refaeli, a former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, puckering up with chunky, totally nerdy computer guy. The story line: Go Daddy's found the perfect match of brains and beauty.

The action gets even rougher in Kia's spot, featuring a former Miss USA, Alyssa Campanella, who plays a sexy robot who plasters a car-gawking dude — who leaves fingerprints on and kicks the tires of a new Forte — with a punch that sets him flying on his can.

Speed Stick gets into the act, too, with a guy at the laundromat who accidentally finds himself holding a cute stranger's yellow panties.

But the sexiest battle may be that of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit models. In one corner, there's Go Daddy's Refaeli. In the other, there's supermodel Kate Upton, appearing in the Mercedes-Benz commercial as a hopeful dude's dream date.

Maybe next year, some savvy advertiser will coax Betty White into a bikini.

• Ads with and by you. There was a time when Madison Avenue utterly ruled on Super Bowl Sunday. The nation's biggest and most powerful advertisers and advertising agencies used to publicly wrestle to display who could wow TV viewers by creating the one TV commercial that everyone would chat about the next morning at the water cooler.

But in a social-media age, not only is the water cooler empty, but so is the notion that consumers will idly sit by and watch whatever the advertising kingpins have to show them.

These days, many folks want to be hands-on. With an assist from the big agencies and advertisers, some people will create the ads that air Sunday — or, at the very least, choose to vote on which ads appear. This is a trend that Doritos began seven years ago with its "Crash the Super Bowl" platform that lets real people compete to create the ads that air based on online consumer voting. Once again, the chip brand has two consumer-created spots in Sunday's game.

Others, will have the chance to actually appear in — or even have their tweets included in — Super Bowl commercials. Lincoln is broadcasting a dramatization of tweets consumers submitted about their wackiest road trips. And Coca-Cola is urging fans to vote online to decide which of three commercial endings it uses in its ad. The ending to the Audi ad also was based on consumer input. And Pepsi asked people to send their photos for possible inclusion.

• Celebrity swarms. It just wouldn't be a Super Bowl without a couple of dozen celebrities — from A- to C-list — parading in and out of the commercials.

But this go-round there's a twist: celebrity swarms. That's right, ads with celebs showing up in teams of three or more. The hope: Amid the crowd and frenzy of Super Bowl advertisers, the right celebrity might actually catch your attention.

Mercedes-Benz will flaunt three celebs: supermodel Kate Upton, singer Usher and actor Willem Dafoe.

Subway, too, loads its Super Bowl spot with familiar celebrities and jocks, including spokesman Jared Vogel, superstar quarterback Robert Griffin III and nearly a dozen other athletes.

Samsung's spot features comic actors Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd and Bob Odenkirk, all trying to figure what the next "big thing" is. It turns out, at least in this commercial, that the next big thing is someone who is arguably already a big thing: LeBron James. And, of course, James has a cameo in the ad.

• Weird wildlife. There was a time when putting a puppy or cute kitty in a Super Bowl spot all but guaranteed instant payback. But Madison Avenue being Madison Avenue, well, it's rarely satisfied with what actually works.

So this Super Bowl, it seems, the domesticated, furry critters are increasingly being replaced by the undomesticated kind. Goodbye cats and dogs. Hello wolves, sabertoothed tigers, rhinos, cheetahs — and gazelles.

A Skechers spot features a guy in a pair of Skechers who manages to outrun a cheetah in order to save the gazelle that the cheetah is eyeing for dinner. And the sabertoothed tiger joins a family for breakfast in an offbeat Hyundai spot.

Don't rule out a real dinosaur showing up next year.

• Ads go long. At $3.8 million per 30-second slot, it might seem that cost-conscious Super Bowl advertisers would all try to ram their messages into a very tight time-frame.

Not this go-round. This Super Bowl comes complete with at least two, two-minute commercials, and several full-minute spots.

Chrysler has done it before. Its two-minute spots at halftime last year featured Clint Eastwood and the year before had Eminem. The carmaker is believed to have at least one, two-minute commercial in this year's game, but is keeping mum.

Samsung, however, isn't keeping mum. Its two-minute spot, featuring three comic actors and LeBron James, is all about trying to call attention to its own coolness factor.

While the arguments for two minutes in terms of prominence and story-telling are compelling, the risks are huge. Two minutes is an enormous amount of time to capture and keep the attention of a generation more accustomed to 140-character tweets and five-second sound bites. While a 30-second dud on the Super Bowl can be a yawn, a 120-second dud can be a brand buster.

• Put up your dukes. It might seem that there's nothing new about fists flying during the Super Bowl — particularly during the commercial breaks. After all, a fight is a fight, right?

Not this year. Some of the bigger punch-outs aren't about guys fighting guys, but about guys fighting wild animals — and women beating up dudes. These are all staged slapstick fights, of course, aimed at luring frazzled viewers to give a look.

In the Kia spot the former Miss USA as a robot basically pulverizes the guy, while in Coke's commercial, a Las Vegas showgirl beats the pants off a motorcycle dude.

Things get even weirder in a couple of spots that pit man against beast. If the Skechers ad isn't enough, there's the Axe ad in which a hunk of a lifeguard beats the be-jeebers out of a shark that is about to attack a bikini babe.

Are you watching, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals?

• Name that tune. Savvy advertisers know that on Super Bowl Sunday, it's not just what viewers will see that matters, but also what they hear. While all the commercial images can become a blur, the right music can turn heads.

Music, also, is generational. Marketers typically use it to hit the target they want. On Super Bowl Sunday, it's at the most focused. While Volkswagen, for example, is using famous YouTube rants to appeal to Millennials, it's also reaching out to Baby Boomers with a musical nod to their past: The familiar theme song to the Partridge Family Come on Get Happy, re-created by reggae legend Jimmy Cliff.

Taco Bell, meanwhile, is setting its spot to music — but with a Spanish twist. The commercial, about ol' folks breaking out the retirement home for a night of romping, is a Spanish language version of We Are Young.

Pepsi, of course, has Beyonce singing at halftime. And then there's Wonderful Pistachios, which convinced YouTube sensation Psy to pen new, nut-worthy words to his Internet hit, Gangnam Style.

• Guys as goofballs. There was a time when the guys who showed up in Super Bowl commercials were as tough as the guys on the field.

That was followed by a far different time, when the guys in the Big Game spots became touchy-feely wimps.

Now we're in yet another era: guys as goofballs.

An ad for Pepsi Next focuses on a father who's apparently more concerned with the calories in his soda than his kid's party that's destroying his home. A Kia spot features a dad who mindlessly spins an absurd tale for his kid who asked where babies come from. A Century 21 spot stars a groom who literally faints at the altar when he's told his mother-in-law will be moving in.

• Wishing and hoping. There's apparently a new way to make dreams come true in 2013: watch the Super Bowl ads.

The theme embraced by several advertisers is the notion of one's fondest wishes being granted — almost in fairy godmother-like style.

Toyota is doing it with its "Wish Granted" spot, featuring actress Kaley Cuoco. In the ad, Cuoco tosses clouds of pixie dust that appear to make wishes come true.

Likewise, Taco Bell latches onto the trend, magically giving a group of senior citizens a very special, youth-driven night out on the town — ending up, of course, at Taco Bell.

Then, in a couple of Bud Light spots, rabid fans reach out for a magic touch to help their teams win.

But the real wishing and hoping Sunday night will be on the part of every Super Bowl advertiser who wants to achieve lightning in a bottle.

But faster than you can say poof, most will disappear.

The roster of Super Bowl advertisers:

Anheuser-Busch InBev: Beck's serenade

Anheuser-Busch InBev: Black Crown coronation

Anheuser-Busch InBev: Black Crown celebration

Anheuser-Busch InBev: Bud Light journey

Anheuser-Busch InBev: Bud Light chair

Anheuser-Busch InBev: Budweiser Clydesdales

Audi: Prom-goer in dad's Audi

Axe (Unilever): Girl goes for astronaut

Best Buy: Amy Poehler seeks help

Blackberry (RIM): Blackberry 10 phone

Calvin Klein: Man vs. Machine

Cars.com: No stress car buying

Century 21: Groom faints at wedding

Chrysler

Coca-Cola: Who gets to Coke oasis?

Doritos: First consumer ad winner

Doritos: Second consumer ad winner

E-Trade: E-Trade baby returns

Gildan Activewear: Guy wants his t-shirt

GoDaddy: Model kisses geek

GoDaddy: Danica Patrick is pilot 30

Hyundai: Epic play date

Hyundai: Boy takes on bullies

Hyundai: Sonata turbo passes

Kia: Where babies come from

Kia: Robot woman gets tough

Lincoln (Ford): Wacky road trip

M&Ms (Mars): M&Ms sing

Mercedes-Benz: Kate Upton

Milk Processors Education Program: "The Rock" hunts for milk

Mio (Kraft): Change is good

National Football League: Players thank fans

Oreo: Cookie debate

Paramount Pictures: "Star Trek Into Darkness"

Pepsi: Party with Pepsi Next

Pepsi: Halftime introduction

Samsung Mobile: Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd

Skechers: Guy outruns cheetah

SodaStream: Soda bottles explode

Speed Stick: Guy folds panties

Subway: Jocks congratulate Jared

Taco Bell: Seniors night out

Tide (Procter & Gamble): Both teams featured

Toyota: Kaley Cuoco grants wishes

Universal Pictures

Volkswagen: Happy office worker

Walt Disney "Iron Man 3"

Walt Disney: "Lone Ranger"

Walt Disney: "Oz"

Wonderful Pistachios "Gagnam Style" star Psy

Nelson Peltz comes after Hellmann's and Dove | CNN Business

New York CNN Business —

A shakeup may be in the works at Unilever, the consumer goods giant behind brands like Dove soap, Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Vaseline.

Unilever (UL) announced Monday that Nelson Peltz, one of the most influential corporate raiders on Wall Street, will join the company’s board of directors and disclosed that Peltz’s fund holds a 1.5% stake in Unilever (UL).

Peltz is an activist investor known for pushing under-performing companies to restructure, spin-off businesses and even break up. In the past, he has helped force changes at food and consumer giants such as Procter & Gamble (PG), Mondelez (MDLZ) and Wendy’s (WEN).

It’s not immediately clear what Peltz has planned for London-based Unilever, which has lagged rivals in recent years and made three failed bids to acquire GlaxoSmithKline’s consumer health care business.

In January, Unilever said it was cutting 1,500 management jobs around the world and simplifying its business structure.

Some analysts have called for Unilever to split its food and drink brands from its home and personal care division.

Wall Street, however, is betting that Peltz will help transform Unilever. Shares rose 8% during early trading Tuesday. Analysts say the company needs a major revamp.

“Unilever has a double problem,” said AllianceBernstein analyst Bruno Monteyne. The company is in “structurally low growth categories” and investors have lost confidence in the board and management.

Monteyne expects Peltz to bring Unilever “back to basics” and focus on investing in innovation, adjusting executive compensation incentives and accelerating the pace of acquisitions and sales.

Unilever has been on Peltz’s radar for months. In January, the Financial Times reported that he acquired a stake in the company. On Monday, Unilever chair Nils Anderson said in a statement that the company has held “extensive and constructive discussions” with Peltz.

January 2019 free food, meal deals and other savings

January is the month of resolutions.

And if you're resolving to save more money in 2019, you've come to the right place.

Welcome to USA TODAY's January guide of free food, meal deals, made-up food holidays and other savings.

One of the month's sweetest days is Jan. 23, which is National Pie Day not to be confused with Pi Day held March 14.

Bookmark this page because it'll be updated frequently with more specials.

Here are the deals, big days and ongoing specials, available at participating locations. To be on the safe side, always check with your closest location before heading out. Also, some will require you to have a restaurant's app or be signed up for emails.

More:Businesses offer furlough freebies, shutdown specials and assistance to federal workers

More:McDonald's brings back 2 for $5 Mix & Match Deal, includes new Quarter Pounder with Cheese

More:Free coffee, doughnuts, cheeseburgers and more: How to fill 2019 with freebies and deals

Limited-time specials

7-Eleven: Through Feb. 12, get a small cup of Chips Ahoy Hot Chocolate or any other hot beverage for $1 at participating stores. According to the convenience store chain, the limited-edition flavor is “a combination of fresh-baked cookies and warm hot chocolate.”

Carrabba’s Italian Grill: Through Thursday, Jan. 31, get a free order of lasagne or spaghetti to take home when you dine in and order select signature dishes, including Chicken Bryan, Chicken Marsala, Pollo Rosa Maria or Chicken Trio and mention the “Carrabba’s Today, Carrabba’s Tomorrow” offer.

Hardee's: The fast-food chain’s new Angus Thickburger Melts – the Cheddar Bacon Melt and the Mushroom Swiss Melt – start at $3.

IHOP: For a limited time at participating locations, get all-you-can-eat pancakes with any breakfast combo or get just the pancakes for $4.99. Dine-in and buttermilk pancakes only. Some exclusions apply and this offer isn't valid with senior and kids meals.

Jack in the Box: For a limited time, get $1 medium seasoned curly fries with the restaurant’s mobile app. On the menu section of the app, select “app exclusives” and add fries to your cart.

On The Border Mexican Grill & Cantina: For a limited time, get endless seasoned ground beef or Chicken Tinga tacos for $8.99 at participating locations. Dine-in orders only.

Red Lobster: Lobsterfest is back for a limited time and the seafood chain has its largest selection of lobster dishes available all year.

Subway: Through Feb. 6 or while supplies last, get $3 off any $3 order with a purchase through the Subway app when you pay with PayPal. According to the fine print, "Limited to the first 50,000 to save the offer."

Taco Bell: Not a deal, but in a tweet Taco Bell announced the Naked Chicken Chalupa is back on the menu "for a hot second" and to "get it ASAP before it disappears again."

More:Taco Bell testing new items for menu: Beefy Potato Flatbread, two new Nachos Boxes

Jan. 28: Pretzel Pizza returns to Little Caesars

After a four-year hiatus, Little Caesars is bringing back its "much-loved Pretzel Crust Pizza" to its U.S. restaurants starting Monday, Jan. 28.

The pizza was first introduced as a limited-time promotion in 2014 and features "a large buttery-flavored soft pretzel crust pizza with creamy cheddar cheese sauce, mozzarella and Muenster cheeses and pepperoni." The pizzas are $6 plus tax and will be available at participating locations nationwide for a limited time.

“When the pretzel pizza promotion ended in 2015, we were inundated on social media and with phone calls, emails, and even online petitions by pretzel-loving customers,” said Ed Gleich, Little Caesars senior vice president of global marketing in a statement. “Four years later we’re still getting those requests and have a very passionate fan base. In fact, it’s still our most common product request.”

Pretzel Crust Pizza is available from 4 to 8 p.m. and customers can order ahead and pre-pay with the Little Caesars app, then collect the order using "Pizza Portal pickup, the Little Caesars heated, self-service mobile order pickup station."

Jan. 28-Feb. 4: Get a free Wendy's Baconator

There's a bacon battle heating up and Wendy's says it wants to prove it's the "Boss of Bacon."

The fast-food chain is giving away free Baconator burgers with zero delivery fees through DoorDash with a $10 purchase through Monday, Feb. 4.

“We’ve always owned bacon and that’s not changing because our competitors are throwing a happy hour to celebrate its importance,” said Kurt Kane, Wendy's executive vice president, chief concept and marketing officer in a statement. “Bacon is at the core of what we do at Wendy’s, and we aren’t afraid to throw down the gauntlet.”

Use promo code FREEBACONATOR when checking out at DoorDash to receive one free Baconator with a $10 purchase and also get free delivery. The promo code can only be used one time for each DoorDash account, but the free delivery is available all week without a promo code.

Wendy's says in a blog post that it has offered bacon since 1982 "when we threw the first slice of our delicious bacon on the flat grill, giving consumers the freshly-cooked bacon they deserve."

McDonald's hosted a nationwide bacon bash and hour-long free bacon giveaway on Jan. 29, before launching its new bacon lineup Jan. 30, which include Cheesy Bacon Fries, the Big Mac Bacon burger and the Quarter Pounder Bacon burger.

Jan. 30: Aldi's Valentine's Day items go on sale

If you're looking to wine and dine your sweetheart, discount grocer Aldi's heart-shaped cheese and a special chocolate wine will be available starting Wednesday, Jan. 30.

The two heart-shaped cheeses part of the Happy Farms Valentine’s Day Cheese Assortment are $3.99 each and the Chocolate Cellar Chocolate Red Wine, available at locations that sell alcohol, costs $7.99. Prices can vary.

Aldi, one of the world's largest grocery store chains, has other Valentine's Day special products including: Specially Selected Heart-Shaped Chocolate Chip Brioche for $4.99, Reggano Valentine’s Day Pasta for $1.99 and Belmont Chocolate Sampler or Chocolate Covered Strawberry Cheesecake for $9.99.

There will be several non-food items, including: a Bee Happy 39-inch Cuddle Valentine Plush for $12.99, the Heart to Tail Valentine’s Day Dog Toy Set for $8.99 and Pembrook Valentine’s Day Cards for 99 cents.

Hours vary by location but many stores open at 9 a.m. weekdays. The special items will be available while supplies last. In November, Aldi's wine and cheese Advent calendars quickly sold out.

Jan. 30: Krispy Kreme's heart doughnuts available

Krispy Kreme's new Valentine Conversation Doughnuts will be available starting Wednesday, Jan. 30 and through Valentine's Day.

More:Krispy Kreme looks to fill Sweethearts candy void with Conversation Doughnuts for Valentine's Day

Jan. 30: McDonald's launches bacon menu

On Wednesday, Jan. 30, Cheesy Bacon Fries, the Big Mac Bacon burger and the Quarter Pounder Bacon burger join the McDonald's lineup for a limited time.

More:Free bacon, bacon and more bacon: McDonald's, Wendy's go whole hog on what Americans love

Jan. 31: Baskin-Robbins' $1.50 scoops

On Thursday, Baskin-Robbins celebrates its original 31 flavors with $1.50 scoops at participating locations. The Celebrate 31 promotion happens in months with 31 days.

Jan. 31: Bruegger’s Bagels anniversary

Bruegger’s Bagels celebrates its 36th anniversary Thursday, Jan. 31 with its annual free bagel giveaway. From open until 11 a.m. Jan. 31, members of the Inner Circle loyalty program get three free bagels with any purchase and the special offer.

“Our fans are the reason for our success, and that’s why we want to give them the gift of free bagels in celebration of our anniversary,” Bruegger’s Bagels President Tyler Ricks said in a statement.

Join the loyalty program at https://rewards.brueggers.com/subscribe. The free bagels' coupons will be sent on Thursday, Jan. 24, according to the Bruegger's website.

For taking part in the anniversary celebration, customers will also get a coupon for $2 off a future $5 purchase, valid through National Bagel Day, Feb. 9.

Plus, the chain will have a contest on social media. To enter for a chance to win a year of free bagels and coffee, post a “current or past photo of themselves at a Bruegger’s bakery” on the company’s Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts.

Jan. 31: National Hot Chocolate Day

Not to be confused with National Hot Cocoa Day held in December, National Hot Chocolate Day is Thursday, Jan. 31.

Biggby Coffee: At participating stores, baristas will be featuring different varieties of hot chocolate and some locations will hand out a variety of bounce back coupons, which will be valid until Feb. 13.

Nestlé Toll House Café by Chip: Buy a hot chocolate and get one free Thursday, Jan. 31. Find locations at www.nestlecafe.com/locations.

7-Eleven: Through Feb. 12, get a small cup of Chips Ahoy Hot Chocolate or any other hot beverage for $1 at participating stores. According to the convenience store chain, the limited-edition flavor is “a combination of fresh-baked cookies and warm hot chocolate.” Plus, with the 7Rewards loyalty program, when you buy six coffees, hot chocolates, fountain drinks or Slurpee treats, your seventh is free. Sign up for the free program at the 7Rewards website, by downloading the 7-Eleven app, messaging the 7-Eleven bot on Facebook Messenger or by picking up a physical 7Rewards card at participating locations.

Ongoing specials

Applebee’s: The January drink of the month is the "$2 Captain and Cola,” made with Captain Morgan Spiced Rum and Pepsi and served in a 10-ounce mug.

Cicis: The pizza buffet chain has joined forces with Nickelodeon’s Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to create “Rise of the Turtles Tuesdays.” Each Tuesday through March 12 from 4 p.m. to close, kids 10 and under get a kid’s buffet for 99 cents with the purchase of one adult buffet and large drink. Limit one kid’s buffet per adult buffet and drink purchase. Learn more about the promotion at www.cicis.com/rtmnt.

Chili’s: The chain’s first $5 margarita of the month for 2019 is a fan favorite from 2018, The Cherry Blossom. The drink features of Lunazul tequila, St-Germain, Fresh Sour and Grenadine.

Dunkin’: Through March 3, get a medium-sized latte or cappuccino, hot or iced, for $2 from 2 to 6 p.m. at participating locations.

KFC: For a limited time, KFC is offering a two for $3 deal on its Chicken Littles. The sandwiches are available in four flavors: Smoky Mountain BBQ, Extra Crispy, Nashville Hot and Georgia Gold.

McDonald's: With an offer on the fast-food chain's app, buy one sandwich and get a second for 25 cents. Some sandwiches are excluded including the new bacon items. According to the offer details, this deal will be valid once per week through March 31.

Olive Garden: The fast-casual Italian restaurant announced its first-ever Never Ending Stuffed Pastas. For a limited time, get unlimited refills while dining in on four stuffed pastas including Stuffed Ziti Fritta and Cheese Ravioli with a choice of four sauces and five toppings. Prices start at $12.99.

Panda Express: Through Sunday, Feb. 3, get $10 off one Family Feast or $25 off two Family Feasts with promo code TOUCHDOWN. For online and app orders only.

Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen: For a limited time, get three pieces of chicken tenders or bone-in chicken with a biscuit for $3.99.

Taco Bell: Get a free drink with any purchase through the app or website once-a-day through Feb. 1. According to the fine print, this deal is available at participating locations for web and app pay ahead orders only.

Wawa: Through Feb. 3, get any cup of hot coffee for $1 including Kenya AA Reserve coffee, which is available for a limited time. This offer is for self-serve coffee.

Wendy’s: The fast-food chain has brought back its Giant Junior Bacon Cheeseburger – also known as the Giant JBC – and its signature $5 meal deal. The combo deal, available for a limited time at participating locations, includes the Giant JBC, four-piece chicken nuggets, small fries and a small drink for $5. The burger also is available a la carte for $3.49. Pricing and participation can vary.

More:Last day for Gymboree and Crazy 8 returns is Feb. 1; gift cards worthless after Feb. 16

More:Sonic Drive-In adds county fair favorite deep-fried Oreos to menu

More:They're back! Taco Bell's Nacho Fries now available for a limited time nationwide

Kelly Tyko is a consumer columnist and retail reporter for Treasure Coast Newspapers and TCPalm.com, part of the USA TODAY NETWORK. Read her Bargainista tips at TCPalm.com/Bargainista, follow her on Twitter @KellyTyko and email her at kelly.tyko@tcpalm.com.

Venerable movie theaters still fill seats in eastern Iowa

Emery Styron

Special to the Register

“Why would you want to stay home and watch a little box? Because it’s convenient? Because you don’t have to get dressed up, because you could just sit there? How can you call that entertainment, alone in your living room? Where’s the other people? Where’s the audience? Where’s the magic? I tell you, in a place like this, the magic is all around you.”

— Dialogue from the movie, "The Majestic"

+++

Movie magic is all around southeast Iowa.

Entrepreneurs and communities have joined hands to restore 19th and 20th century entertainment palaces. Using a blend of technology, creature comforts and marketing savvy — not to mention hot, buttery popcorn — they keep filling theater seats in small downtowns.

The movie business is tough in rural markets, said Brian Fridley, vice president of Des Moines-based R.L. Fridley Theatres. The company has sold some of its properties at bargain prices and even given away others, such as the Temple Twin in Mount Pleasant. Scott and Amy Lowe couldn’t imagine their town without its theater, so they jumped on Fridley’s offer of a free building in 2012.

Aided by a $40,000 grant from the city, the Lowes wasted no time in launching a $400,000 renovation of the former Masonic Temple, uncovering high ceilings and crown moldings that would help them recapture the structure’s 1920s flavor. Customers would thank them for replacing grimy restrooms, carpet and seating that, in Scott’s words, “assaulted every one of the senses.”

In a nod both to Disneyland and the theater’s downtown location, the Lowes renamed the business Main Street Cinemas. Customers flocked back in to enjoy modern amenities like digital projection, Dolby Surround Sound and rocker-back seats with cup holders and leg room.

From the restored, digitally lit marquee to the plush-carpeted lobby hung with classic movie images to the gold-accented, red-and-black paint scheme, the intent was to make the theater “a place you want to be,” and offer a different experience than watching movies in a modern multiplex.

The enlarged concession stand and expanded menu offering pretzel bites, pizza, wine and beer is part of the effort to differentiate. Popcorn, soda and candy remain the top sellers.

The improvements were well received.

“We were pleasantly surprised with the public appreciation and the business uptick we saw,” said Mr. Lowe.

Fridley, meanwhile, was restoring to the State Theater in Washington to its 1946 look. After a 2010 fire caused extensive smoke and water damage to the former downtown opera house, Fridley utilized historic tax credits and grants funneled through Washington’s downtown revitalization group for improvements including digital projection, surround sound, new seats and carpets, remodeled concession area and reopened balcony.

“The community is loving it,” manager Crystle Christner said of the restoration.

She doesn’t think Washingtonians would support a multiplex.

“Sixty-five to 70 percent of our population is retired. They don’t want new-fangled stuff,” said Christner. Customers like getting popcorn from a well-seasoned machine that’s been popping since 1948, she said.

While Washington and Mount Pleasant play mainly recent or first-run movies, Burlington’s restored Capitol Theater and Performance Center specializes in classic films and live events. Owned by a non-profit foundation that has raised $2.5 million for improvements, the Capitol offers concerts, classes and workshops and a venue for local high school and college drama productions.

The investment in digital projection at Burlington, Mount Pleasant and Washington is expensive — costs run upwards of $100,000 per screen — but the technology opens a new world of possibilities. Besides enabling 3D movies, captioning and language options, the digital systems allows computer scheduling and play of feature movies, commercials, preview and announcements. Even light and sound levels can be preset with the system.

Anything that can be viewed on a computer can now be projected to the big screen. That capability allowed Main Street Cinemas to invite customers to turn out in tuxes and evening gowns for cocktails and a viewing of the Academy Awards. The Capitol is planning a video game event to utilize its digital capacity.

When the Capitol was built in the dreary Depression days of 1937, says manager Jerry Johnson, “going to the theater was supposed to transport you to another land, to put you in a majestic place you wouldn’t normally be.”

Even in 2015, when entertainment can be streamed to any device, anytime, anywhere, Iowa’s small communities still have plenty of people who still want to be transported, to experience the magic of laughing, screaming or clapping as they watch a movie on the big screen — together.

A CLOSER LOOK AT SOUTHEAST IOWA THEATERS

Capitol Theatre, 211 N. Third St., Burlington, IA 52601, 319-237-1099

Executive Director: Jerry Johnson

www.burlingtoncapitoltheater.com

The then-state-of-the-art, 700-seat Capitol Theater opened in 1937 with a showing of "The Prince and the Pauper," starring Errol Flynn, and operated until 1977, when it closed with a showing of "Carrie." It took 25 years for the Capitol Theater Foundation to form and raise funds to reopen the facility as a movie theater and performing arts center. Programming includes a $5 Classic Movie Series, Cheap Date Movie Nights, Family Movie Sundays, the Annual Snake Alley Film Festival, concerts, local drama performances, classes and workshops. Concessions include wine and beer.

Grand Theatre, 26 N. 6th Street, Keokuk, IA 52632, 319-524-1026

Pat Kemp, member of Grand Theatre Commission

keokukgrandtheatre .org

Built on the foundation of the Keokuk Opera House, which burned in 1923, the Grand opened in 1925 and was known “as the finest theater west of the Mississippi,” according to local resident Pat Kemp. Traveling vaudeville companies played there and movies there were well attended but the theater fell on hard times, opening and closing repeatedly. The Bott-Millar Charitable Trust saved the Grand from the wrecking ball and turned it over to the city, which delegated upkeep and management to the 15-member Grand Theatre Commission. No movies are shown but the Grand is booked about 50 weekends per year for meetings and performances.

Orpheum Theater, 121 West Broadway Ave., Fairfield, IA 52556

Building owner: Johnson Real Estate, 641-469-1919

The Orpheum Theater opened in 1910 and operated until 1940, when it closed for remodeling. Students from Parsons College won a contest for the best redesign idea, so when the theater reopened on Christmas Day that year, the name was changed to the Co-Ed Theater in their honor. The Co-Ed closed in September 2012 and reopened in 2014 under the ownership of Modern American Cinema, which changed its name back to the Orpheum, and briefly showed a mix of blockbusters, independent, foreign and documentary films before closing. The theater has a 1920-30s atmosphere and is equipped with lounge and sofa seating, digital projection and sound equipment, according to owner Chris Johnson. It opens for rentals and special events, such as the recent, sold-out Creative Edge Film Festival.

Main Street Cinemas, 115 N. Main St., Mount Pleasant, IA 52641, 385-3726

Kelly Miyoshi, manager

www.mainstreetcinemas.net

The former Temple Twin Theater was remodeled in 2013 and renamed Main Street Cinemas by new owners Scott and Amy Lowe. The facility shows first-run and recent movies, including 3D, on two screens. The recently expanded concession stand serves popcorn, candy, soda, pretzel bites and pizza. Wine and beer is available for consumption on 21-and-up balconies with enhanced sound and seating. The theater is available for rental to school and church groups and other organizations.

State Theatre, 123 East Washington, Washington, Iowa, 319-653-4023

Manager: Crystle Christner

www.fridleytheatres.com/washington.html

Built in 1893 as the Graham Opera House, the facility first showed movies in 1897. Washington resident W. Frank Brinton showed some of the earliest silent films there until World War I. The State now shows recent and first-run movies, including 3D, 365 days per year on its single screen. Free 46-ounce popcorn every Tuesday with paid admission.

UDF balancing family history, new approach at 75

Emilie Eaton

eeaton@enquirer.com

Norwood-based United Dairy Farmers had a rewarding year.

The company was recently ranked the fifth largest privately-held company in Cincinnati on the Deloitte Cincinnati USA 100 list, it was the company's 31st year in the top 100 of the prestigious list, and it was the business' 75th anniversary.

Family principles are at the foundation of the company, which was founded by Carl Lindner, Sr. in 1940. Since then, the company has grown rapidly, and it now has nearly 2,100 employees. The company does not disclose its revenue.

CEO and third-generation leader Brad Lindner met with The Enquirer to discuss the way the company operates, recent success and future plans.

Oh, and ice cream.

Here is a portion of Lindner's hour-long interview with The Enquirer, with some questions and answers edited for brevity.

To what do you credit UDF's recent successes?

I think probably a couple of key things, one of which is the legacy that we inherited from my grandfather, father, uncles and aunt. Not only the business itself, but the approach to business. They probably trained us well by their example to treat people – both employees, customers, vendors – with the respect that they deserve, to be fair, to have that commitment to quality, yet also combine that with creating value or having value.

We always strive to offer the best that we can for a reasonable price. And we frankly have been very fortunate to have outstanding people working for us over the years, who have been very committed to the company and what they do, what it stands for.

How do you balance the legacy that came from your family with your own innovative approach?

That’s the tightrope that one walks, which is holding on to those things that are core values and looking at the past for some direction, but not constantly focusing on the past. One needs to look at the future and be responsive to changes in business and society and demographics.

I think the other important factor is to hire good people, and hire people with outside experience. There’s a nice mix of processes and approaches that have been successful and gotten us to this point, and bringing in fresh ideas from a lot of different large companies, people who have had past experience with large companies. Having those ideas, techniques, approaches blend in with some of the old historical approaches. It’s a combination of a Fortune 500 blended with a small family business. You try to strike a balance and get the best of both worlds, so there’s a sense of professionalism, sense of urgency, but also a sense of familiarity, a sense of humor, and a sense of camaraderie.

You mentioned looking forward to the future. What's in store in the future?

We are working on a new store prototype, and hopefully we will have some examples of that finished in the second quarter of next year.

I think we probably are using more research in general to help guide us, to help make some decisions, as opposed to just relying on internal opinions or gut feel. We’re back checking some things and getting a better understanding of who our customers are. That’s been a more recent push for us.

With dealing with our training of our people, developing our people, putting more of an emphasis on that... There are a lot of mandated training modules that store employees have to go through in respect to alcohol sales, tobacco sales and (payment card industry) compliance. Years and years ago, before we had those, we could focus more time on how to make a sundae or how to make a malt. It’s evolved over the years. The oxygen in the training room has been sucked up a lot by those mandated modules that have to be by law trained. I think we will look to add emphasis and training hours back to those skills that are specific to the dairy, primarily, around ice cream treats and how to make those.

Vaguely speaking, what will the new store prototype be like?

Again, it’s kind of looking at that balance of what worked for us in the past and the opportunities going forward. There’s going to be more emphasis on coffee, fast food, refrigerated space, specifically adding beer barns to the store, which we have a number of, but that’s been pretty successful. Emphasizing the fountain beverages – the soft drinks, that come out of the machine. A bit more fresh thematically.

What has been your biggest success or accomplishment and your biggest failure since becoming CEO in 1998?

When I say I, I’m talking euphemistically for the company. Our biggest successes has been to offer UDF branded gasoline. We used to offer branded Mobil gasoline for close to 12 years. That was good at the time. We learned a lot, we got a lot of experience. I think we gained a lot of credibility and respect in the consumer’s mind with respect to our fuel and our fuel offering. But by delinking with Mobil, we improved our purchase price of fuel considerably.

As far as failures go, that’s a long list. Generally speaking, my biggest failure – and I won’t be real specific – but it’s when we’ve hired or I have hired somebody and discovered that it wasn’t a good fit, not reacting fast enough to enact a change to let it work itself out...I’m getting better at that, but hiring people is really challenging. Interviewing people and trying to get a sense of who’s really sitting there. Are they really just play acting for a couple hours to convince you and then somebody else show up on the first day of work?

How many hours do you work? I’ve heard your Dad was notorious for being in here on weekends.

Sundays not too much. He would always be in church on Sundays, but Saturdays he would come in during the morning and typically do that for half a day.

I don’t have the same rigor he does. I’m more of a five-day-a-weeker, although realistically it’s very difficult to detach yourself from work. ... Your mind is engaged all the time on things at work. Obviously you can enjoy a game or a TV show or a movie or something like that, and be distracted. Whether cutting the grass or doing something, I find myself problem-solving or thinking about what’s transpired the last week, what has to happen the next week or the next year or so on.

Your Dad still comes to work, correct? The receptionist tried to send me to him when I said I was here to see Mr. Lindner.

Yeah, he just turned another major milestone this year, which was his 95th birthday. He still comes in on a daily basis. He doesn’t come in as early as he used to, and he doesn’t stay as late as he used to, but that’s a wonderful thing – to have your Dad around at 95. Most of the time it’s a wonderful thing (laughing).

Does he ever give you advice?

Oh yeah. Not as much as he used to.

I give him a lot of credit. Often time in family business I think, the patriarch or the person who started the business has a hard time letting go and passing responsibilities on to the next generation. I’m fortunate to have two other brothers working here. And more recently, two of my children have started working here. I give Dad a lot of credit for letting us take the reins.

Your family is so well-known in Cincinnati. Does being in the public eye have any downsides?

We’re probably more cut from the cloth to stay out of the limelight, and that makes it a bit more challenging to do so. To maintain some sense of privacy is a bit more challenging. I think to a large degree most of my uncles and father and aunt preferred to be behind the scenes instead of being out front, on display.

I’ve heard that UDF is in the process of expanding in Dayton and Columbus. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Based on some of our research, we found specifically in Columbus that people like us. They like to shop at our store. They like our ice cream... Looking at the concentration of dairy stores in Cincinnati relative to Dayton and Columbus, we thought we would focus more of our efforts on those two markets in the upcoming future.

Any other markets that you’re interested in?

We’ve had some pretty good success in country markets... Out in the country, there’s not a lot of opportunity to go get a scoop of ice cream. You can get a whippy dip, but that’s different than a hand-dipped hot fudge sundae or a chocolate malt.

You mentioned that two of your kids are involved in the company now. What do they do?

One is an assistant brand manager for us, and the other is a category manager. ... Both of them came up through the stores. They started out going through clerk training and working as a clerk, and then came into the office.

Is your daughter who’s at Occidental College in Los Angeles interested at all in the business?

I don’t think so. She’s more of a STEM person. She started out in chemistry, and that was a little bit too dry for her, so she moved to biology. ... Hopefully she’ll pursue something that follows her college degree.

Have any of your kids expressed an interest in someday taking on a bigger role?

...I think I have had the conversation with them. Ideally, they get a broad sense of experience throughout the company, so they are better at whatever they end up doing. Who knows – maybe they’ll even go somewhere else and do something other than this. This is a great opportunity for them to gain really intricate knowledge in a broad breadth of experience, in a lot of different disciplines and functions, and come away with an understanding of how business operates and what it takes to be successful.

Have you thought about how long you want to stay CEO?

Occasionally, yes (laughing).

Having two other brothers engaged, I would say it’s a good partnership. ... I’m thankful for those guys being here. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to be the lone guy in charge. I really enjoy and appreciate the knowledge that they bring, the experience that they bring to the party.

At some point, it would be nice to shove a little more stuff on my younger brother and free up a little bit more time. He’s 10 years younger than I am. Maybe I could take a two-week vacation sometime, but I don’t have any specific timeline.

Okay, I have one more question. It’s the most important question…

What’s my favorite flavor?

Yes. I’m sure you’ve been asked that before.

Frankly, that’s kind of a hard one. I don’t know if I could have one favorite flavor. If I had to say one, probably it would be our homemade chocolate.

Why?

Flavor, body and texture. We use a really good cocoa out of the Netherlands that I think really offers a superior flavor. I like chocolate, and this is a good chocolate. A lot of chocolates I think are a little bit kind of weak. Whether it’s the type of cocoa powder they use, or the amount they use. Ours is not harsh, but it’s kind of a good balance of chocolaty goodness.