In June 2018, the marketing team behind IHOP made an announcement that sent the internet into a collective tailspin. After sixty years as the International House of Pancakes, the chain was legally abandoning the letter P and rebranding to IHOb. For days, the company played coy about what the mysterious lowercase b stood for. Guesses … Read more
Despite the famously repeated New York legend that the egg cream never contained eggs or cream, the historical record proves otherwise. In fact, there can be no question. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, long before it evolved into today’s iconic mix of milk, seltzer, and chocolate syrup, the original egg cream absolutely … Read more
We can count cows and pigs. We can certainly count sheep. But we don’t eat a beef, we eat some beef, and we would never say “three porks.” Yet if you open old volume of the Oxford English Dictionary, you’ll find a strange historical artifact: the official plural of beef was once beeves and the … Read more
We have a number of familiar and iconic peanut butter brands. There is Jif, Skippy, and Peter Pan, flanked by store brands and upscale organic jars. But, isn’t something missing? Where in the world is Planters Peanut Butter? It’s one of the most persistent curiosity gaps on the food internet. Planters is the undisputed, century-old … Read more
As of 2008, Shreddies had been one of Canada’s most popular breakfast cereals for nearly seventy years. First introduced in 1939, the lattice-woven whole-wheat squares, similar to Chex in the US were a household fixture. They were reliable and nutritious. They were also undeniably square. Then, Kraft and advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather announced a … Read more
In the corporate branding industry, a self-serving myth has taken hold over the last few decades. It’s the idea that consumer food brands achieve multi-billion-dollar success through predictive psycho-linguistics. According to this theory, brand strategists and corporate consultants carefully construct names using phonetic sound symbolism, manipulating front vs. back vowels and soft fricatives vs. hard … Read more