Episode 4

Making And Selling Candy

This week, SAS asked us to make and sell candy at the London Zoo. I was in the losing team.

This has been the toughest task to date. On the day we were making candy, Adam, Sophie and I were up until 2am making chocolate lollipops. We finally got to bed at 3am and had to wake up at 5am to get ready and head to the zoo!

I thought Adam was a good project manager. He allowed me to get on with what I needed to do and was encouraging and supportive. It was a real shame that our market research was not utilised again (major deja-vu with dog task)!

I was one of the top salespeople in this task again. The rest of the team were finding it easy to sell the chocolate lollipops. So I predominantly focussed on selling the orange ones.

Our lollipops were considerably more expensive and smaller than the ones on sale at the shops in the zoo, so I had to think of a way to make them special. My technique was to sell them as 'magic' lollipops, by holding them to the sunlight so that the jelly tots and hundreds and thousands 'magically' appeared. With the chocolate lollipops, I tried focussing on the quality of the Belgian chocolate, the fact that they were handmade and encouraged customers to feel the soft marshmallow paw shape through the plastic.

This approach worked really well as I was able to engage customers in brief conversation before trying to sell the candy. I often wouldn’t let people leave until they'd bought at least two - one of each! Adam saw this was working and tried to get Natalie to adopt a similar approach, with disastrous results as you saw.

Apart from paying for the lion costume, Simon and I secured the ant and anteater costumes for free from the promotions department at the London Zoo! We remembered this idea from Series 1 when Paul got the Rosie Bear costume at Harrods.

That loser cafe is getting more and more depressing...

Lohit Kalburgi