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“THIS IS ONE
of our big sellers right now,” says Neil Edley, owner of Sugar Plum
Chocolates, showing off packages of the red, white and blue popcorn that
his equipment started cranking out shortly after September 11. And that’s
not all: “Our American flag chocolates and American flag pretzel rods are
selling great, too,” Edley adds. “This has been a very busy time for us.”
(Like I’ve always said, nothing fuels America’s desire to kick Osama’s ass
like corn-syrup-covered, stars-and-stripes-inspired snack food.)
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Before September 11, Plum Chocolates sold the kind of generic
novelty chocolate you’d find in your average drugstore. But now, with
America ratcheting up its patriotism, the company is retooling by offering
an entire line of chocolate in all sorts of patriotic shapes and
sizes.
That means gift boxes of chocolate
molded into the shapes of fire department badges, trucks, ladders,
fireplugs and helmets (after all, nothing says “Thanks” to the heroes of
the New York City Fire Department like a box of chocolate
fireplugs).
I encountered Edley at last
week’s Fancy Food and Confections show at New York’s Javits Center, an
annual gathering of the nation’s food manufacturers that I attend
religiously. (And not only because I leave with enough “samples” of
barbecue sauce to last a year, but because it’s always been a great place
to gauge the state of the American Stomach, a formerly pink organ that now
resembles a pigskin from the old World Football League).
Indeed, Plum Chocolates’ American flag pretzel rods and
sugary popcorn are just the tip of a huge red, white and blue culinary
iceberg. Osama bin Laden struck his biggest blow on September 11, but that
evildoer has also done lasting damage to the American way of snack
food.
So instead of the usual, homespun
foods on display—Gourmet cheese straws! Gourmet peanut brittle! Gourmet
pickled watermelon rinds!—this year’s convention featured an astounding
number of ways for Americans to put their patriotism where their mouth is
(and vice-versa). Everywhere I turned, I ran into confectionery companies
seeking to exploit (uh, sorry, tastefully mourn) the terror attacks on
America by retooling their candy molds, re writing their catalogues and
stocking up on red, white and blue food coloring in hopes of capturing
even a small piece of the newly digestible national fealty.
“People are going with patriotic themes now,” said
Cindy Stani, whose company, Executive Extras, makes gift baskets for our
nation’s top executives. Can’t decide what to get the patriotic CEO who
has everything? Well, Executive Extras now offers red, white and blue sour
candy stars in an American flag tin.
“It’s
selling almost twice as many as our other tins,” Stani said. Later, she
showed me a star-shaped glass bottle filled with jellybeans in familiar
shades of ruby, cream and cobalt. It’s also selling much better than
similar products. (Of course it is; nothing says “My country ‘tis of thee”
better than jellybeans in the rouge, blanc and bleu
of Old Glory).
“And we’ve gotten a lot of
requests for Stars and Stripes milk chocolate balls,” Stani added. “We got
bombed and now people are showing their patriotism. And, man, I don’t
blame them.”
Like Stani, Terri Bihl of
Gimbal’s candies, a 104-year company based inSouth San Francisco, got so
many demands for patriotic sweets that the company invented the USA Sour
Star, a gummy candy which is now outselling the company’s biggest seller:
cherry fish.
“Everyone is on the patriotic
bandwagon,” Bihl said. “Customers want to show off their patriotism in
every way possible.” |
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I stopped by a
booth run by Ford’s Foods, a North Carolina manufacturer of the fine line
of Bone Sucking Barbecue sauces, which are selling better than ever—even
though none of the sauces are despoiled by red, white or blue
dyes.
“Our sales are way up,” said Patrick
Ford, who has become a de rigueur stop on the annual Gersh Kuntzman Fancy
Food and Confections Show Crawl not only because he’s a nice guy, but
because he’s extremely generous when it comes to giving away free sauce to
reporters hungry for a...story.
As an
example, Ford showed me a five-gallon jug of barbecue sauce. “In years
past,” he said, “we would sell plenty of these to restaurants and very few
to regular people. But now it’s turning around. That tells me that people
are trying to stay close to home. It’s regular customers who just want to
be surrounded by comfort. We noticed our sales jumped right after
September 11.”
Of course they did. Let’s
face it, nothing says “I love the U. S. of A.” like barbecued pork fat
slathered in Bone Sucking sauce.
Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post and a
sportswriter for The Brooklyn Papers. His Web site is at http://www.gersh.tv/
© 2002 Newsweek,
Inc.
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Perspectives
