Baked bean pizzas

Years ago, a friend started a new job at one of the most famous food brands in the world — expecting to learn a lot about how things are done at the top.

One of his first assignments was to sort out their new, but loss-making, line of “baked bean pizza”.

He took himself away from the management meetings, spreadsheets and emails, and drove to the factory in Grimsby, a small industrial town in England.

On his tour of the plant he came to a key step of the production process.

As the pizza bases rolled past on the conveyer belt, there was a big funnel of baked beans, applying a dollop on each pizza.

But next to the funnel was a stressed worker with a tin opener and a pallet of cans of beans — opening them one by one, as quickly as he could, to keep the funnel topped up.

Behind him was a huge bin of empty cans. A symbol of the waste.

Maybe this was first suggested just to do a prototype run of the pizzas, or while initial sales volumes were low — but then managers forget, people get used to things and don’t want to be awkward, and stuff quickly becomes ‘just the way things are done’.

And that’s the way margin and morale leak out of a business.

So, are there any stressed people with can openers in your agency?