On October 14, 1968, Gigliotti was called to a Corporate meeting, in advance of a Board Meeting scheduled for later in that day.  He was given a copy of the McKinsey Report and a copy of a Corporate Board announcement, dated that day, stating that the McKinsey recommendations were being implemented effective November 1st, the target market being carbonated beverages, the six current research groups to be retained at their current locations but assigned under a new Director, and the new Director of this corporate low-oxygen packaging project (LOPAC) was to be Michael Gigliotti of the Plastics Products Division.  The project was given a two-year funded term, the first year to determine technical feasibility and the second year to determine commercial feasibility.  The announcement immediately stirred internal and external Monsanto interest, comments and contacts. 

 

Among the latter, the most useful was Allen Heininger, then General Manager of the Monsanto Food and Flavors Division, who called Michael the next day to volunteer making contacts for Gigliotti among the leading carbonated beverage companies.  He recommended, and Gigliotti agreed, that Monsanto should have two soft drink companies alongside of two beer companies, and that the soft drink companies should be Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper, and the beer companies should be Anheuser-Busch and Coors. 


Heininger promptly made dates for Gigliotti to visit with Mr. Robert Woodruff, Chair/CEO/major shareholder of Coca-Cola; Foots Clements, President of Dr. Pepper; Augie Busch of Anheuser-Busch, and Jeff Coors of Coors Brewery.  At each of these visits, a quick handshake and draft agreement was reached, under which, in exchange for first rights to commercial development if successful, the beverage companies would run their own organoleptic and shelf life tests on each set of the candidate bottles sent to them by Monsanto, on a strictly-confidential basis, returning all bottles to Monsanto.  All agreed that Monsanto would not inform them of the chemical nature of the polymers they were testing and that Monsanto would assure them in writing that the contents were safe for taste-testing, having done initial organoleptic and toxicity testing with its own people before shipping samples.  

 

Within the first several days, Gigliotti talked, by phone, or visited with the managers of each of the six research groups that had been assigned to him, making certain that he understood the extent and success probability of each project in each group.  He then began a round-robin series of visits with the textile research groups in Pensacola Florida and Decatur Alabama, the Central Research Group in St. Louis, the Corporate Research Group in Dayton Ohio, the Polymer Research Group in Springfield Massachusetts, and the Packaging Research Group in Bloomfield Connecticut.  Since the Packaging Research Group occupied the whole of the Bloomfield Technical Center, with the agreement of Jim Crawford (the Packaging Division General Manager), Gigliotti became the on-site manager of the Bloomfield Technical Center and responsible for the progress reporting for the LOPAC project.