What you’ve heard it true. Walk into almost any grocery store in France, Germany, or the United Kingdom, and you’ll find cartons of eggs stacked regular room-temperature shelves shelves next to the baking flour and dry pasta. In the United States, that same display would be a gross health code violation and quite shocking. This … Read more
According to business analysts, the world before the late 1990s was desperately waiting for someone to solve the great, agonizing puzzle of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The popular narrative assumes that mass-market adoption was simply the inevitable result of a food-science breakthrough. Once industrial food scientists cracked the code on moisture barriers and … Read more
Every few months, business publications and financial channels run somber video essays analyzing the perpetual crisis of the meal kit industry. They’re great at citing a staggering number, telling us that among major delivery services like HelloFresh, Blue Apron, and Home Chef, roughly 90% of customers cancel their subscriptions within a year. However, financial analysts … Read more
If you open up a brown paper bag of Chinese takeout in the United States, you will almost certainly find a handful of familiar condiment packets tossed into the bottom. Alongside the standard packets of hot mustard and soy sauce will be a bunch of orange to yellow gel labeled simply, Duck Sauce. Every day, … Read more
A modern genre of consumer commentary revolves around taking mundane facts and making them the next big outrage moment. A common premise is to treat normal commercial kitchen safeguards as deliberate corporate crimes. In these food exposés, standard casual dining operations are routinely reframed as calculated corporate conspiracies, like the viral claim that Olive Garden … Read more
During the mid-1950s, Campbell’s Soup began running bizarre full-page ads in major magazines. The ads pictured an elegant old-fashioned glass filled with ice cubes. The amber liquid from a can of Campbell’s Bouillon (Beef Broth) is being poured over the ice. The headline boldly commands: “Soup on the Rocks!” When modern people stumble onto articles … Read more