Be Thankful For 3D-Printed Chicken Soup
Campbell's fired an employee without first asking the right questions. Now he's putting a big dent in its can.
This Week In Blunders – Nov. 23-29
“Campbell’s® does not use 3D-printed chicken, lab-grown chicken, or any form of artificial or bioengineered meat in our soups.” – Press release.
Campbell’s should not have to deny that its chicken comes out of a 3D printer, but its apparent mishandling of an employee complaint threw the iconic American food manufacturer into full PR crisis mode this wonderful Thanksgiving week.
Suddenly the company behind “M’m! M’m! Good!” was fighting headlines that read more like “M’m! M’m! God, what a mess!” So much for mom’s green-bean and cream-of-mushroom-soup casserole this year because maybe they print bioengineered fungus, too.
It all started when Campbell’s employee Robert Garza went to a top executive to discuss his salary. Instead of a raise, Garza got a bizarre, hour-long, racist, profanity-laced rant that included disparaging remarks about Campbell’s fine products.
Martin Bally, who was then Campbell’s vice president of information technology, allegedly called Indian employees “idiots” while he quite idiotically told Garza that he uses marijuana edibles on the job.
Garza was hired as a security analyst in Sept. 2024 and far be it for a security analyst to overlook an admission like this. But when Garza started to complain, the company fired him instead of investigating Bally.
Garza filed a civil rights and hostile work environment lawsuit against Campbell’s on Nov. 20 – just in time for Thanksgiving. But worse for Campbell’s, Garza had recorded the whole conversation.
Garza then took the recording to WDIV-TV in Detroit, and boy did WDIV blow it out:
“We have s--for f**king poor people. Who buys our s--t? I don’t buy Campbell’s products barely anymore. It’s not healthy now that I know what the f---’s in it,” part of the recording said. “Bioengineered meat --I don’t want to eat a piece of chicken that came from a 3-D printer.”
“F---ing Indians don’t know a f---ing thing,” the recording said. “Like they couldn’t think for their f---ing selves.”
From there, every media outlet from The Wall Street Journal , The New York Times and major television networks on down reported the 3D printed-chicken story.
The Journal even followed up with a story headlined, “Here’s What’s Really in a Can of Campbell’s Soup” noting lots of salt and some ultra processed ingredients that consumers are suddenly trying to avoid these days.
This is a cautionary tale about the kind of reputational damage a single mishandled employee can do to a brand. It is sure to stand as a case study for future HR textbooks, assuming we still have employees who are not 3D-printed AI robots themselves.
On Wednesday, Campbell’s put out a statement saying Bally was no longer with the company. It also complained about Garza: “Neither Mr. Garza nor his lawyer ever notified us of the existence of an audio recording.”
Yeah, well, someone should have asked before firing him. A corporate defense lawyer should have considered that Garza might have evidence to back up his product-damning lawsuit and tried to swiftly negotiate before he went nuclear. And everyone should assume everything is recorded these days, because too often, it is.
Now Garza has opened up a family-sized can of whoop-ass.
Eat that, Campbell’s.
Nvidia CEO: Quit worrying and train the robot
At an all-hands meeting on Thursday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told employees not to worry about all the other tech company layoffs in the news.
“I want every task that is possible to be automated with artificial intelligence to be automated with artificial intelligence. I promise you, you will have work to do,” he said in a recording reviewed by Business Insider.
A day earlier, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a report claiming that AI can already replace nearly 12% of the U.S. workforce.
Remember when U.S. employees were tasked with training cheaper workers overseas? The nation’s unemployment rate soared to nearly 10% in 2010. And today our top private employers are Walmart, Amazon, UPS and Home Depot.
Investigators probe Jefferies in First Brands debacle
The stunning implosion of auto parts conglomerate First Brands Group has the Securities and Exchange Commission asking questions of one of its financiers, Jefferies Financial Group, according to a report by The Financial Times on Thursday.
Read More: Parts Is Parts (Business Blunders)
Jefferies was among the unwary titans of finance who bought into this pile of financially engineered junk, along with UBS and Blackstone. No comment from Jefferies, but CEO Rich Handler has said in the past that Jeffries was defrauded.
Jefferies advised the company, provided it with invoice financing and placed billions of dollars of First Brands loans with investors, FT reported. So now he tells us.
The investigation is a sign that this embarrassing blowout is rippling through large financial institutions and that there’s more folly to uncover. First Brands has filed bankruptcy with more than $12 billion in debt and somehow $2.3 billion remains missing.
The blowback has got to be a lot for Handler to handle.
About that lead-based paint job from Lowes
Lowe’s Home Centers on Tuesday agreed to pay $12.5 million after its contractors potentially exposed customers to dangerous lead dust and paint chips, according to the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Lead-based paint has been banned in the U.S. since 1978, but when you’re sanding and scrapping down older homes you have to be careful not to spread the old paint around, as Lowes and its contractors have apparently just learned.
I’ve placed this folly atop a new Business Blunders feature I’m experimenting with called Business Blotter. Think of it as the police beat briefing you can get from local newspapers only for business.
Read More: Getting the Lead Out At Lowes
I envision it as a weekly roundup of white collar complaints and enforcement actions. Not much joking or commentary like you get from Business Blunders. Mostly just brief descriptions and links to official documents and news sources if readers want to go deeper.
At this point, I don’t plan on sending Blotter emails. But I’ll link it for those of you who’d like to take note of the staggering amount of fraud, deception and folly we’re getting from the business world every single week.
We’ll see how it goes. It may be just too damn disheartening. Let me know what you think.
What a doozie, Al! Definitely add me to blotter...Happy Holidays!
Good heads up ! (Garza) recording the conversation.