March 8, 2017
If you are what you eat, then everyone is surely part Mondelez. Mondelez is a food conglomerate that owns many notables, from Chips Ahoy to Philadelphia Cream Cheese to Triscuits and Wheat Thins. Yes, that’s right. The two most polar opposites on the cracker spectrum, Triscuits and Wheat Thins, are actually siblings. And now you […]
July 6, 2015
Let the trashcans go hungry! Spoiler Alert connects restaurants and grocers who have surplus food with non-profits that can use it. If the extra food is still edible, it goes to soup kitchens, pantries, and the like; if it has gone bad, it goes to compost makers or gets turned into animal feed. Either way, […]
February 11, 2015
In the 1980s in LA, Vietnamese immigrant David Tran started making his own version of a hot sauce based on a condiment from the Si Racha city in Thailand. He called it Sriracha, but never registered a trademark, and today his company, Huy Fong Foods, rakes in a hot 80 million dollars a year selling […]
February 25, 2011
I love running across great brand names, and this week it was Naked Pizza. Here’s a name that not only sparks my interest, but starts a conversation about what makes this brand different. (10 whole grains and other natural stuff, no additives or chemicals.) The name also makes healthy food sound like fun: no small […]
January 27, 2011
Yesterday on Twitter someone started a meme called #AwfulCereal. The point was not, as many people mistakenly thought, to post the name of the cereal you happen to dislike – because honestly, no one cares about that. Really. They don’t. No, #AwfulCereal was a JOKE meme: you make up the name of a really horrible […]
April 30, 2010
You know how people often go to the store to buy good old-fashioned dairy milk, and then buy this stuff called “soy milk” figuring it’s the same thing? Milk is milk, right? Yeah, I’d never heard of that happening either. But that’s exactly what the National Milk Producer’s Federation is alleging in their new campaign. […]
April 14, 2010
We couldn’t help ourselves: The KFC Double Down was just such a wacky sandwich and product name that we had to try our hand at renaming it. What would you have named the Double Down? Here are a bunch of our other, catchy names. Can you do better? Chickadon’t (from Chickadee) Chicken Out Chicky Clear! […]
By now you’ve likely heard all about KFC’s newest monstrosity masquerading as a sandwich. The Double Down is composed of two chicken breasts as the outer “bread,” and bacon, cheese, and sauce as the middle filling. There are plenty of reviews of the actual sandwich and its insane composition. But, as your friendly naming […]
January 15, 2009
As I was browsing the Huffington Post earlier today, I came across this juicy little tidbit announcing that PETA wants to change the “name” of fish to sea kittens (after all, who would want to eat “sea kitten sticks”?). At first I thought it was a joke, but then I saw the post on the […]
July 30, 2008
I don’t know about yours, but my neighborhood is suddenly covered in ads for Grape-Nuts. The marketing slant is one of bold refusals of common euphemisms and descriptions that have found their way into our vernacular. A billboard near my house reads, “I hope we can still be friends,” which is crossed out with red […]