If there’s anything you can bet on in the American market place, it’s that chocolate will sell. Even in down economies, chocolate manufacturers and resellers do well; they have a captive audience that loves their product, and it’s treated as, if not a staple, at the very least, the premium luxury food when times are tough. Now there’s an added twist – unprocessed cocoa powder is high in anti-oxidants, which (theoretically) makes chocolate a health food.
Enter Xocai (pronounced “show-sy-cai”), which emphasizes these health benefits as part of a multi-level marketing business. The primary product line centers around products containing unprocessed, dark cocoa powder. The big item is a beverage, called Activ, but there are also cookies and brownies. All of these are comparatively unsweetened, but are still pretty tasty.
So, we’ve got a product, we’ve got a market, and we’ve got a pitch. How solid is the opportunity? Well, the literature on the health benefits is quite nicely produced; it makes the case that dark, unprocessed cocoa powder is one of nature’s wonder foods, and does so convincingly (like you need to convince anyone to eat chocolate…). They make an assortment of health claims, ranging from boosting the immune system to scavenging anti-oxidants to giving a quick burst of energy. Now, all these anti-oxidants are still being checked out in clinical trials, so, like most wonder-food promotions, Xocai is jumping on a hot trend and trying to get out ahead.
The recommended dosage of Xocai products is 3x daily; this, to me, for what are essentially unsweetened cookies, is a bit skepticisim-inducing. At least they’re not promoting them as weight loss items. The standard pitch is a bit dated from an MLM perspective; they recommend giving away lots of free samples, and selling to friends and family members.
The Xocai compensation plan is a double binary setup; these are legit, but a bit tricky to understand. They make claims that the compensation will pay out about 50% on a distributor’s volume, so it’s got the same claims as most MLM techniques. Unlike most MLM programs, they don’t have a product with a definite ‘end of life’ date – the market for Xocai products, once established, should remain stable for as long as the health claims hold up and aren’t refuted.
The overall recommendation? If chocolates are something you can be enthusiastic about, and you’re willing to live with a revenue stream that will hit market saturation and stay there (rather than promise unlimited long term logarithmic growth), Xocai may be the right opportunity for you. However, you will need to understand a fair number of basic MLM success principals to make the most of it, because the actual MLM portions of their strategy are a bit staid.