RONCO SIGNS OFF
Late-night Veg-O-Matic hawker files for Chapter 11
The maker of the Veg-OMatic, the Showtime Rotisserie oven and the 5 Minute Pasta Wizard has been cooked again.
Ronco — whose TV spots hawked gadgets like Mr. Microphone and the Beef Jerky Machine, a dehydrator it called “a one-way ticket to meat-lover’s heaven” — filed for Chapter 11 this week, its third trip to bankruptcy court since it first went public 49 years ago.
The filing comes a year after Ronco’s failed attempt to raise $30 million in an IPO that sounded like one of its late-night pitches: Buy $1,000 in shares, and get a 20 percent discount on its Web site. Spend more than $5,000 and get a Ronco Rotisserie, too.
That was despite a warning in the IPO filing from auditors at the time, who raised “substantial doubt” about whether the company was viable.
Ronco’s founder and TV pitchman, Ron Popeil, who sold the company in 2005 for nearly $60 million, said Friday he has an inkling about what led to the most recent demise of the brand he launched in 1969.
“The Showtime Rotisserie did over $1 billion in sales over its lifetime, and the current owner changed it,” Popeil, 82, told The Post. “They retooled and started over in China. They had a winner. Why would you take your best product and change it?”
The prolific inventor, who now lives in Beverly Hills, Calif., said that Ronco — which was sold at least three times after he left it — added other products to its line “to make it look like they were a bigger company than they were,” but that the products were “really worthless.”
The Chapter 11 filing lists the company’s assets and liabilities between $1 million and $10 million.
The $30 million in cash that Ronco tried and failed to raise in its IPO last year “was key to keeping the lights on in a business that was losing $4.5 million per year,” Adam Stein-Sapir, a bankruptcy expert at Pioneer Funding Group, told The Post. “With- out it, they were forced file for bankruptcy.”
Ronco owns the rights to Popeil’s former products and the rights to use his name and likeness, but not for any new Ronco products. Popeil’s name and image are so important to Ronco that at one point the company took out a $15 million life insurance policy on him.
“I remember that someone asked me permission for the policy many years ago,” Popeil said, adding that he agreed. The policy “still exists, but I don’t know who owns it,” he added.
The Austin, Texas-based company’s lawyer did not return a call for comment, and its president, William Moore, could not immediately be reached on Friday.
“I know the current owner and I’m a good friend of his,” Popeil said. “But running a business is not his talent.”
But wait — there’s more: Popeil is still plying his trade as an inventor, and recently produced a turkey fryer that can be used on a kitchen counter. He is close to signing a deal with an investor who wants to sell Popeil’s new inventions on TV, like in the old days.
“I might do walk-ons to talk about my new products,” he said, adding, “I look a little older now.”