How Edible Arrangements Is Embracing a New Kind of 'Edible' What once seemed like a threat to Tariq Farid's business is now a huge opportunity.

Tariq Farid thought he had a lock on the word edible. For more than 20 years, his company, Edible Arrangements, was famous for its bouquets of fruit and platters of chocolate-dipped fruit, and customers had begun casually referring to the company as simply Edible. In 2013, Farid went all in -- trademarking the name Edible by itself and dropping Arrangements.

Then, in 2016, California passed Proposition 64, which legalized recreational marijuana. Farid read the text of the bill and was horrified: The word edibles was in there -- familiar to any pot lover, and now enshrined into law to mean weed-laced food. We can't let it happen, he recalls thinking. We have to do something about it.

Do what exactly? He wasn't sure. But he tried to fight it -- and as he did, he learned an important lesson about business: Sometimes the greatest threats are opportunities in disguise.