June 3, 2025
In business, timing isn’t everything—control is.
While competitors focus on product innovation and marketing strategies, the smartest companies have discovered a different path to dominance: controlling the supply chain itself.
From plastic pumps to flash memory chips, the most brilliant business moves in recent history haven’t been about building better products but about ensuring competitors can’t build any products at all.
The Strategic Blueprint
When David Protein bought EPG’s only producer and cut off competitors, they weren’t inventing a new strategy. They were copying some of business history’s most brilliant moves, though.
Here’s how three other companies turned supply chain control into market domination:
The Pump Heist: Softsoap vs. Big Soap (1980)
Picture this: You’ve just invented liquid soap, but Procter & Gamble could crush you in months.
Robert Taylor’s solution?
Buy every plastic pump in America—100 million of them for roughly $12 million.
While P&G executives scrambled to find pumps overseas, Softsoap exploded from zero to $25 million in sales within six months.
By the time the giants could launch competing products a year later, Taylor had transformed his startup into a household name.
The payoff: In 1987, just seven years after the pump gambit, Colgate-Palmolive bought Softsoap for $61 million—a 5X return on the pump investment alone.
The Billion-Dollar Bet by Apple (2005)
Steve Jobs saw the iPod flying off shelves and realized one thing could kill the momentum: running out of memory chips.
His move?
Write checks totaling $1.25 billion to lock up flash memory from Samsung, Toshiba, Intel, Micron, and Hynix through 2010.
This wasn’t just buying components—it was buying the entire future supply.
While competitors waited in line for leftover chips, Apple churned out 30 million iPods.
The prepayment was the largest component commitment in consumer electronics history at the time.
Battery Hog: Elon Musk with Tesla (2004-2020s)
Elon Musk didn’t just want batteries; he wanted ALL the batteries.
Tesla partnered with Panasonic to build the Gigafactory, initially investing billions to create exclusive battery production capacity.
At its peak, the Nevada facility produced more lithium-ion batteries than the rest of the world combined.
While legacy automakers scrambled for battery suppliers, Tesla had locked up Panasonic’s most advanced cells.
The partnership gave Tesla a 5-year head start in the EV race.
The Fat Replacer Monopoly by David Protein (2024)
EPG is a modified plant oil that makes “guilt-free” junk food possible—fewer calories, same taste. When David Protein acquired Epogee (the sole EPG producer), they didn’t just buy a supplier.
They bought the power to decide who gets to make healthy snacks.
Competitors woke up to cancelled shipments—two years of supply stockpiled.
The move has now sparked an antitrust lawsuit, so we’ll see what happens.
But lawsuits take time, and until then, they control the ingredient, which means they control the industry.
Conclusion
These four cases reveal a common thread: in competitive markets, the companies that win aren’t always those with the best products, but those with the smartest resource strategies.
Whether it’s plastic pumps, memory chips, batteries, or specialized ingredients, controlling critical supply chains can transform startups into industry giants and maintain market leadership for years.
As David Protein’s recent EPG acquisition shows, this strategy is alive and well in 2024—proving that sometimes the best way to beat the competition is to make sure they can’t even play the game.