There is a widely repeated corporate legend about the birth of the McDonald’s “Super Size” promotion. As the story goes, a McDonald’s director named David Wallerstein was auditing a Chicago location in the 1970s when he noticed customers licking the final salt crystals and ketchup off their empty wrappers. This gave him a “profound” psychological … Read more
If you have ever wondered why oranges are sold in red mesh bags, and limes in green ones, you are not alone. People are constantly searching for the “real reason” behind this grocery store staple, but the internet has recently turned this simple packaging question into a highly sophisticated, psychological conspiracy theory. If you watch … Read more
If you search the internet for the origin of the canned “Potted Meat Food Product” sitting on the bottom shelf of your local grocery store, you will run headfirst into a ubiquitous, lazy piece of copy-pasted food history. Dozens of trivia sites and digital archives will confidently inform you that the William Underwood Company “invented” … Read more
If you consult the standard bibles of American food history, the story of commercial ketchup is treated as a single-player game. Elite reference texts and mass-market culinary historians routinely dismiss the entire competitive landscape with a lazy, one-sentence afterthought: “Other early companies that produced ketchup included Hunt’s and Del Monte.” By treating Heinz’s absolute market … Read more
The late 1960s and early 1970s marked an era where American corporations could successfully sell suburban parents virtually anything, provided it was wrapped in a shiny foil space suit or blessed with a casual nod from NASA. If it was high-tech enough to keep an Apollo astronaut alive during a lunar orbit, it was deemed … Read more
Many internet searchers who grew up in the 70s want to know what happened to Kraft’s short-lived 1970s peanut spread. The internet hands out a definitive conclusion. According to most accounts, Koogle was discontinued because a scathing 1975 Consumer Reports investigation exposed it as a sugary junk food that was only 60% peanuts. While this … Read more