There is an unspoken conspiracy in popular food history that requires the ancient Romans to be credited with inventing everything we eat. If a food exists in modern Western culture, an internet article somewhere insists a Roman legionary carried it in his rucksack or an emperor demanded it at a banquet. If the Romans can’t … Read more
From a culinary culture and business perspective, the cupcake boom of the mid-2000s to early 2010s was undeniably weird. Food trends come and go, but this one was a bit oversized, for lack of a better term. The narrative surrounding this big boom of tiny cakes often gets treated like a harmless curiosity. Nothing more … Read more
Jonathan Goldsmith’s “Most Interesting Man in the World” was a subversive advertising masterpiece that tripled US sales for Dos Equis. Yet behind the viral joke lay a fatal flaw: the campaign created curious beer tryers rather than loyal drinkers, leaving the door wide open for competitors.
Klondike abruptly killed the beloved Choco Taco in 2022, setting off nationwide grief. Despite rumors of poor sales, the treat was actually profitable. Here is the true story of its 1983 structural invention, its mechanical manufacturing bottlenecks, and the corporate audit that doomed it.
Pop history creators, whether videos or text, love to reduce complex food history questions to easily digestible factoids. One such sensational claim concerns the origin of dessert. According to this claim, mersu, a 4,000-year-old Babylonian preparation of dates, flour, and fat, is “the world’s oldest dessert.” Certainly, this makes for an irresistible hook, promising a … Read more
In a recent video breakdown of modern grocery economics, an Aldi executive discussed the chain’s business model with the kind of reverent solemnity usually reserved for Silicon Valley disruptors: “It’s about simplicity, and it’s about efficiency, and it’s about a consistent experience all the time.” The narrator quickly chimed in to display the spoils of … Read more