Sliced Bread27 Apr 2023

Toast - Series 1: Friends Reunited

While Sliced Bread takes a break we serve up… Toast. A study of the spectacular failures of wonder products and businesses which had promised so much to consumers.

You can contact us at toast@bbc.co.uk

In each episode, the presenter and BBC business journalist, Sean Farrington, examines one big idea which ended up toast, examining the reasons behind the failure and discovering what can we learn from its story today.

Sean unpicks all the early optimism, hype and ambition, speaking to expert commentators to discover how they view things now and what, if anything, could have been done differently.

Sean is assisted by the self-made millionaire and serial entrepreneur, Sam White, as together they try to work out what went wrong.

This week, Sean and Sam look into a hugely successful website from a time when most people in the UK were slowly getting used to the internet.

Friends Reunited provided a unique way for users to reconnect with old school friends.

It made a fortune for its founders but was closed for good in 2016. Could it still have been successful today?

Toast is a spin-off from Sliced Bread, the series in which Greg Foot investigates the latest so-called wonder products to find out whether they really are the best thing since sliced bread.

Sliced Bread returns for a new batch of investigations in May. In the meantime, Toast is available in the Sliced Bread feed on BBC Sounds.

Toast is a BBC Audio North production for BBC Radio 4.

The producers are Jay Unger and Jon Douglas.

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