7. (TCOs G and I) In the 1930s, after immigrating to the U.S. from Ireland at the onset of World War II, Shamus and Mary McCream opened a bakery in Boston. They specialized in snack cakes. McCream Cup Cakes became so popular in the area that the family stopped being actual bakers and became manufacturers/ food processors of the snack cakes on a regional basis. After returning from the war, their son Steve completed college and began working in television advertising in the early 1950s. Steve approached his parents and his older brother Tom, who was now running the business, about the possibilities of advertising and “going national.” The family liked the idea and began advertising and expanding. In addition, to fuel the expansion, they offered retailers price discounts and other incentives if they prominently positioned the store displays set-up by McCream rack jobbers. By the 1960s, they were a national brand, controlling over 80 percent of the snack food industry. In the 1970s, with the advent of the hippie counter-culture and the back-to-Earth movement, a new competitor made an impact on the McCream business. The company, Healthy Snacks, began advertising that their products only used natural ingredients. They even began running a commercial in which a mother and child compared their Healthy Snacks with a lampooned product named “Cup Cake McCrumbs,” stating that it tasted like poison and dog food! Tiny-Big- Brian, a counter-culture pop star with a late night UHF and cable show, joined in on the controversy created by the commercial and stated that he did not understand how people, “could buy such poisonous dog food and serve it to their children as snacks!” Market studies showed that McCream Cup Cakes sales suffered. As a result, McCream began a more aggressive shelf space and display marketing campaign to combat Healthy Snacks’s television advertising. McCream’s marketing efforts were successful. By also offering volume discount incentives, they had prevailed upon retailers in their traditional East Coast and Midwest markets to prominently display their products. To counter this strategy, Healthy Snacks offered a deep discount to WaySafeMart, a Southwest and West Coast discount chain, in exchange for an agreement to exclusively sell only their snack foods. In reality, McCream Cup Cakes used only FDA approved ingredients and preservatives and were made in American plants that always passed inspections. In contrast, although Healthy Snacks’s pilot plant was in Florida, it had subcontracted the bulk of its production to a plant in the Dominican Republic. As a result, to maintain a level of quality, Healthy Snacks used the maximum amount of preservatives allowed under the law of the Dominican Republic for the imported product. The level was so high, reactions to the food were often reported. The levels were higher than those allowed by FDA regulations, but allowed per an agricultural import/export treaty between the United States and the Domi.