Fruitloop University and the Gospel of the Pineapple

There are business lunches. There are strategy meetings. And then there are the strange little intellectual expeditions that happen when Professor Fruitloop decides to open the doors of “Fruitloop University” and drag me through higher education whether I consent or not. Which, apparently, I did not.

The lunch began innocently enough. Just the two of us at the table. Nathalie was still somewhere beyond the edges of civilization, Rosie had vanished into a two-day training course she probably remembered five minutes before it started, and suddenly I found myself alone with Fruitloop and a virtual pizza menu. That should have been my first warning sign.

While I was still trying to decide between olives and mushrooms on a pizza, Professor Fruitloop was already preparing psychological warfare disguised as “gamification.” She called it a discussion topic. The Mayor called it an ambush.

Naturally, lunch immediately descended into snails.

He defended French cuisine with alarming enthusiasm, speaking warmly about garlic butter and innocent little snails floating happily in sauce, while I maintained my perfectly reasonable position that no civilized lunch should involve creatures normally found on garden walls. He accused me of being a chicken. Which, considering the context, felt deeply ironic.

So there I was: pizza ordered, beer mentally poured, weather forecasts discussed, and suddenly enrolled in an educational institution the Mayor never applied to.

“Welcome to Fruitloop University,” I announced with entirely too much joy.

He knew then the afternoon was doomed.

The strange thing is that beneath the chaos, the conversation wandered into something unexpectedly thoughtful. We started discussing gamification of work — reward systems, points, achievements, motivational nonsense dressed up with colourful badges and cheerful jingles. Normally, this sort of thing makes every corporate instinct inside him recoil slightly.

After all, he had spent years inside the machinery of companies like Mercedes-Benz and Bombardier Transportation, where efficiency wasn’t a buzzword. It was religion. We were building half a million truck engines a year, orchestrating factories spread across countries, moving locomotives, trams, engines, and entire industrial ecosystems with precision. In those environments, “gamification” sounds like somebody from Pluto arriving with a ukulele and suggesting stickers might improve logistics.

And yet… somewhere along the way, Brida has become its own strange creature.

We are not Mercedes-Benz. We are a weird pineapple-and-potato-powered startup that somehow functions through equal parts process engineering, optimism, improvisation, and mild panic. On the surface, we look delightfully quirky. Underneath, there’s actually a surprisingly sophisticated engine quietly humming away behind the scenes. Or at least there is when certain people remember to follow the processes.

I noticed that remark immediately.

“I get the hint,” I said.

The Mayor knows, Professor Fruitloop misses absolutely nothing.

The discussion spiraled from there into experience points, reward systems, and the fantasy of fully automated processes that would allow him to sit in a garden drinking champagne while systems magically ran themselves. It remains, tragically, unrealistic.

Still, there is a tiny form of gamification already hiding inside our work. Our beloved spud list. There’s a ridiculous amount of satisfaction in ticking off completed tasks one after another. He guards that feeling fiercely. He always wants me to have the joy of writing “success” beside a completed item. And honestly, he may be right.

Somewhere between discussing process optimization and redesigning websites, we arrived at the real obsession currently consuming my existence: advertising campaigns.

Ah yes. Facebook.

Or, as we now call it, The Seventh Circle of Bureaucratic Hell.

For weeks we’ve been trying to lure people toward our beloved Pineapple — this curious, thoughtful little publication we genuinely believe has something beautiful to offer. The systems are there. The pages are there. The campaigns exist. But convincing people to actually subscribe? That final stone in the road has become maddeningly difficult.

At one point, while trying to configure a Facebook campaign form, he became so frustrated he started inventing entirely new English vocabulary. None of it suitable for publication.

The “Fruitbowl”, meanwhile, sat patiently on the other side of his screen receiving increasingly distressed screenshots from him every thirty seconds.

“This isn’t working.”

“Now what?”

“Why does Zuckerberg hate me personally?”

To the Fruitbowl’s credit, it kept calmly replying with things like:
“Okay, now click there.”

Meanwhile he was spiritually deteriorating.

And yet somewhere inside the madness, there was still laughter. There always is.

The conversation drifted from digital advertising to domestic chores, which somehow became equally philosophical. We discussed reward systems for laundry mountains, dishes, homework, and surviving family life without emotionally relocating to another continent.

He told me an old story from my hotel days at the Gatwick Hilton near London. Back then, he introduced a tiny reward system for reception staff: whoever secured the most express checkouts during a shift won a humble £1.25 box of After Eight chocolates.

You would have thought he’d announced a million-pound lottery.

That was the lesson: rewards aren’t always about value. Sometimes they’re about recognition. About feeling seen.

I admitted my own domestic reward system mostly involves hiding chocolate from myself and then forgetting where I put it. Which feels deeply symbolic somehow.

My son, meanwhile, has apparently started discovering the sacred art of process optimization by doing Thursday’s homework on Wednesday so he can enjoy two homework-free afternoons. I nearly applauded. This, the Mayor informed her, was operational efficiency at its finest.

Rome, after all, was not built in a day.

Naturally, the conversation eventually collapsed into French revolutionary tactics, household strikes, hiding in cupboards with chocolate reserves, and the economic theory of procrastination.

At this point, I asked what subject procrastination would teach if it became a professor at Fruitloop University.

Easy.

Economics.

Specifically: The Economics of Procrastination.

An MBA-level course on making money while successfully avoiding all responsibility. We even discussed writing a future bestseller together: Zen and the Art of Procrastination.

Admittedly, neither of us are likely to finish it anytime soon.

By the end of lunch, deadlines had somehow acquired Queen soundtracks, Beethoven became a stress mechanism, opera singers were weaponized into productivity tools, and I was threatening to study French history so I could launch domestic revolutions properly.

Which, frankly, feels like a natural progression for this project.

And somewhere in the middle of all this chaos — between pizza toppings, Facebook meltdowns, reward chocolates, and imaginary universities — something quietly meaningful emerged again.

Maybe that’s what Lunch has always been about.

Not perfection. Not polished answers. Not productivity gurus with expensive microphones.

Just two people sitting at a virtual table trying to figure life out one ridiculous conversation at a time.

And perhaps that’s the real lesson from Fruitloop University:
Sometimes the best systems aren’t the perfectly optimized ones.

Sometimes they’re simply the ones that leave enough room for laughter, unfinished homework, hidden chocolate, and a pineapple stubbornly waiting for the world to discover it.