Is Terrell Owens' Cereal Already Sold Out?!

The first fresh-baked batch of Terrell Owens' honey-oat cereal, officially unveiled in Buffalo yesterday, is an all-pro seller. "By next week, the initial wave—we have two truckloads—will be gone," Ty Ballou, president and CEO of the cereal's producer, PLB Sports, told NEWSWEEK this morning. Even after a long day at work, Ballou says that when he got home last night, he plopped down in front of his home computer to watch the Pay Pal orders pour in: "We're racing production to try and restock the shelves... it's a marketing dream right now." Curious as we are about how you sell a bowl of T.O.—especially in a matter of hours—we picked Ballou's brain about his business. Which athletes make for good mustard, and who's a better candidate for a horseradish sauce? Who gets to decide what T.O. tastes like? The answers await in our chat with Ballou, excerpted below:

Yesterday's events were pretty over-the-top for a cereal launch.
You had to be there—there were hundreds and hundreds of people in there... and it's cereal. I mean, come on. And whether it's Kurt Warner, or Lynn Swann, you know, you walk up there, you say some things, it's nice. This... was kind of like a reality show. When you're in the grocery business, you don't get moments like this. It's cereal or salsa or whatever. But it was tremendous. It was kind of like a movie. I know Terrell brings a lot of excitement when he comes in—I may have to end a career on this one. This is a hall of fame one.

How do you decide if someone is more a cereal kind of guy, or a better fit for a salsa or beef jerky?
We've sold Ed McCaffrey mustard for years, we are a major mustard company in Denver.... With Ben [Roethlisberger], we talked about doing a barbecue, maybe a steak sauce. He liked beef jerky, so fine, we do beef jerky. And we knew that Pittsburgh is a huge jerky market. That lined up very well. With salsa, for example, eight years ago we created a salsa for Pedro Martinez and then we went to David Ortiz and so on. Some of the reasons why this works well is that we do get the athlete's input. We think that Terrell, a honey-nut oat—T.O.s—it made sense. Cereal. Perfect.

What are the stumbling blocks in turning an athlete into a food?
It's easy to come up with a concept. It's being able to then convincing the agent and the athlete, and then you have to be able to convince the retailers. Because when you put a Terrell Owens cereal in, something comes off the shelf in the grocery aisle. There's no holes in there. They're not waiting for this. When this goes in, they have to replace an established brand. So then you have to convince them that whatever this thing is, Terrell Owens cereal, is going to sell better than, I don't know, Wheaties, Lucky Charms, Fruit Loops, Frosted Flakes, Honey Nut Cheerios.

When you get a client like TO, what flavor profile are you honing in on? How you decide what he'll taste like?
We came to them to say hey we want to do a cereal. And to try to replicate something like Flutie Flakes, which was a frosted corn flake—I wanted to get away from that. His name kind of made it easy. A honey-nut oat, which is similar to a Honey Nut Cheerio, is an extremely popular cereal profile. We knew we wanted to go with a pretty sweet cereal that would appeal to kids as well as adults. It kind of lined up. People say, what do you call it? Well, of course you call it T.Os. It's simple. It's easy.

Did he taste-test it?
He did test the cereal, he thought the cereal was great. He has creative approval on all the packaging. We provide the back panel for him, so he has a T-shirt offer on the back and his charity is on the side. It's a double revenue stream.

From the AP report, he seems thrilled.
Well, come on. It's Terrell, and cereal. It kind of makes sense. And he has his own cereal box...we tell people that the Wheaties brand is a tremendous brand, but the is Wheaties and then they feature tremendous athletes like Michael Phelps. But this is the T.O. brand. You own it. There's no other name on it. And he thought that was tremendous.

Do you ever worry you'll have a Phelps-Kellogg moment?
We have that in the contract, as well. We do have an ethics clause in there. And I'll be candid about it too—everybody does, smaller companies like PLB Sports, plus General Mills, Kellogg's. But the problem fi you have to exercise it is this, typically: you've already committed the marketing dollars behind it, whether it's TV, radio.... You certainly can pull the contract, but the problem you have is that you have a huge investment already in. You try to do your due diligence and so on, and you know, whatever, things happen. But it's not as if you yanked it and you're okay. First of all, there's obviously a bit of stigma. And I'm sure Kellogg's had millions of dollars invested in various things... but things happen to people off the field. So knock on wood, we hope that we don't have to ever do that with any of our athletes. But that's something that happens.

I see on the box that it's listed as low-fat—was that an important factor?
It's up to the athlete—I'm sure it was a benefit, too, that it was a low-fat food. The thing I'll say about the product itself: well, it has to taste good, because we want people to buy more than one box or more than one jar. So we do do quite a bit of work to make sure that the cereal is something that the kids are going to eat over and over again. Or that Dad's going to collect it or they're going to bring it out to a Bills' game.