Complex Numbers

Snack Time

Courtesy of Cracked, today we show how something built for laziness can get even lazier.

    The 5 Laziest Snack-Food Innovations  

I'm not knocking lazy, mind you. I'm all for convenience and instant gratification. They're two of the very few upsides of living in a declining civilization. These examples, however, are laziness on the part of the producers.

If you’re a snack company, what better way to rile up the populace than to reveal some sort of never-before-seen orientation of a preferred snack food.

You'd think they'd end up competing with themselves like that.

Sure, you’ve had Reese’s peanut cups for your whole life, but now that they’re shaped, in the vaguest possible way, like a pumpkin, they must be simply irresistible.

Nothing about Reese's cups is irresistible to me. I know this is blasphemy, as they're consistently at the #1 spot of favorite candies, but I don't particularly like them. Maybe if the chocolate were real, and the peanut butter wasn't dry and crumbly, I'd feel differently, but then they'd be expensive and no one else would buy them.

Oreos, now... I've been suckered into new Oreos fillings. Until they produced one that was ambrosia itself, and then discontinued them, at which point they (mostly) lost me as a consumer.

5. Oops! All Berries

I'll admit it: I ate Cap'n Crunch as a kid. It's legitimately the first breakfast cereal I have a memory of consuming. As I was very young, most of it probably ended up on the floor; I don't remember that part, though. And I ate the hell out of its variant with the "berries," but I don't recall craving just the "berries."

This actual product debuted way too late for me to have found out for myself.

I see through you with the ease of un-stained glass. You smelled blood in the water to the tune of sugar-addicted children for whom even the already heavily sugared default Crunch Particles no longer fed their fix. You get to debut a brand-new cereal, and the advertising push that goes along with it, without actually having to invent anything new. You’re just capitalizing on the human fascination of any new offering, and at the same time, hoping we don’t realize this is just a way for you to save on electricity and maintenance costs by giving the robot that combines the Captain Crunch and the Berries one day off a week.

And I don't believe for a second that the company cares about robots' rights.

4. Buncha Crunch

As far as I know, this candy is, despite the name, completely unrelated to Cap'n Crunch cereal... except for, possibly, the sugar content.

When Crunch bars debuted, they chose an unwieldy shape and presentation. A chocolate bar thin enough to be practically allergic to shipping, even before its base architecture was destroyed by a network of weak points in the form of puffed rice.

Worse, it's made by Nestle, which is the Platonic ideal of "evil corporation."

Merely spray chocolate wantonly over a conveyor belt of loose crunch and package them. Then throw them into a cardboard box that they couldn’t be bothered to toss an internal bag into.

Here, I think the author's giving Nestle too much credit. Seems to me they're just packaging their robots' mistakes. Also, still not real chocolate.

3. Corn-Flavored Doritos

Don’t act like some janitor at the Frito-Lay factory accidentally left corn in a toaster and now we’re being treated to a New World of Flavor. Do they truly think we’re no smarter than apes?

As the article notes, these are just tortilla chips, only unhealthier. Want corn chips? Get a hold of Fritos, one of that company's supposed flagship products. Their ingredients list is blissfully short, too: corn, corn oil, and salt. I don't believe in the mantra "if you can't pronounce it, don't eat it," because that encourages ignorance, but having four words of one syllable each can be appealing.

2 Crystal Pepsi

Not sure how this belongs on this list, but to me it's like: "How can we make a Pepsi that's even worse than Pepsi, without making a 'diet' version?"

1. Single-Stuf Oreo

Yes, I mentioned Oreos already, but this is a different issue.

Obviously, the original Oreo is the complete opposite of innovation.

Moreso because they ripped off the original creme-sandwich cookie, Hydrox.

Where my objection lies is in the fact that we cannot let them die the death they should have when their superior successor, the Double Stuf, took the throne.

No.

The Double Stuf is too much. The "creme" is not the best part of the Oreo.

I don’t care what you do with the old ones, market them Diet Oreos for all I care. Which I’m just cynical enough to think would absolutely work.

Stop giving Nabisco ideas. They have enough terrible ones   already.