Delicious/Frookie (Des Plaines, Ill.) gained recognition in the mid-1990s with a line of cookies boasting brand-name peanut butters, Land O'Lakes (Minneapolis) butter and a different cookie of the week featuring a co-brand. The strategy would have been sound: the little-known company capitalizing on a relationship with an extremely well known brand. The problems surfaced on the package.
According to Elinor Selame, BrandEquity International (Newton, Mass.), “Delicious would shout the co-brand on their package design—that Planters or Hershey's were in these cookies. All the co-brand partners had strong recognition and strong brand assets. Delicious probably went to these companies and said, 'We'll use your products, but we want to shout it on our packaging.' They did and were the first in the food industry that started to do it very vigorously.”