Portion Control

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

That's all can say when I look at the latest offering from Mondelez International, the snacking giant that is the keeper of such iconic brands as Kraft and Cadbury and Nabisco. I'm not talking about their Cadbury Double Decker Ice Cream or their new line of Devour Frozen Foods or even their Kraft Natural Cheese made with milk from cows raised without artificial growth hormones. Each is a serious entry in a crowded marketplace that has likely been focus group tested to death before it hit the shelves. 

No, on this National Girl Scout Cookie Weekend, I choose not to focus on Thin Mints or Samoas or Trefoils, but on another staple of the stable. For while young female entrepreneurs sell 200 million boxes of their wares to the tune of about $800 million a year, that total is spread over a dozen brands. On the other hand, Mondelez owns the over $2 billion singular gorilla in the category, the biscuit born the same year as the Girl Scouts themselves, Oreo.

Since 1912 Oreo has spread far and wide, adding variations to keep the brand fresh and appeal to local tastes. In China you can get them with Green Tea crème, while Argentina has Oreo Duos with two flavors in the middle, such as banana and dulce de leche. In Indonesia there is a Blueberry Ice Cream variety, while Mexico has the Oreo Trio, where each individual cookie and the not-so-white stuff are a different type of chocolate.

This country has its own number of twists as well. There are chocolate, mint and berry varieties, as well as special editions like orange Halloween Oreos or this year's purple Easter Egg variety. Last year brought limited edition entrees including Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie and Kettle Corn, while new flavors this year include Carrot Cake and Dark Chocolate. 

However, if you are a purist, you likely gravitate back to the original formulation. The recipe has been tweaked over time, most notably in the early 1990s when health concerns prompted Nabisco to replace the lard in the filling with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. But it all comes down to the simple binary of a pair of chocolate wafers sandwiching a layer of vanilla crème.

In that incarnation it was a smooth unbroken line until 1974. That was the first time the balance of flavors changed with the introduction of Double Stufs. As the name implied, there was twice as much filing as before. Sacrilegious to some, nirvana to others, it found a devoted following and became a staple on supermarket shelves. 

Of course, anything worth doing is worth overdoing. And so in 2013 they released the Mega Stuf Oreo. It had even more of the vanilla filling, approximately a third more than the Doubles. But It was a limited-edition product, and so disappeared faster than a bag of Nutter Butters at my house.

Just as 4G was a necessary precursor to 5G, this year brings us the next step, The Most Stuf Oreo. It has approximately 4 times the crème of the original, sandwiched between a pair of chocolate wafers. If Double was double and Mega was triple, this is merely the logical evolution in the product's continuum. 

But the reason for the laughter in the beginning is not the cookie itself. Rather it is in the labeling on the side. Original Oreos have a suggested servings size of 3 cookies, while Double Stufs recommend an appropriate portion of 2 pieces. But due to the massive amount of filling, The Most Stuf cookies recommends that you open the pack, slide out the sleeve and have the appropriate portion of a single cookie.

I say again: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Like that's going to happen.

More likely you will eat three or more times that, filling your entire allotment of fat and sugars for the day in one go. If you are one who twists the sandwich apart and scrapes the crème off the carriers, you will sand your front teeth down millimeters with a single serving, completely eradicating your incisors by the end of a binge. And you will do it in mere moments while standing over the sink during a commercial break.

Next up: Just Stuf. No wafers, just a tub of filling. Try stopping at a spoonful of that.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford loves cookies of all types. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Fly Right

Most people who travel by themselves have mastered the art of invisibility. Whether it's a train or a plane, you get on, find your seat and go into a zone where you try not to be seen. Some use headphones or a book as a cloaking device, enabling them to retreat into their own little universe, hoping all around will ignore them. Alternatively, some sleep or just feign it to block out any unwanted intrusions. In almost any other venue it might be considered antisocial at best, or rude at worst. But when you are sitting shoulder to shoulder for long periods with another person you've never met before and have no intention of ever seeing again, it's the only way of cohabiting adjoining seats without being married or getting sued. 

That's not to say that your fellow travelers on common carriers aren't civil. Normal pleasantries might be exchanged on first contact. And those on the outside of the row are generally accommodating to those further in, allowing them the ability to exit for rest room breaks and the like. But those are subclauses A and B to Item #1: "Thou shalt sit quietly, not fidget, not make eye contact and not engage." 

Occasionally the wall gets broken, and you get a chatty seatmate. It's not that's there's anything inherently wrong with talking to another person jammed in next to you for an extended period of time. At times it can be diverting or entertaining, helping to pass the otherwise slow march of time as you journey from one place to another. But unlike a party when you feel some obligation to circulate and chat, if it happens organically at 30,000 feet, it happens. If it doesn't it doesn't. And no judgement is passed. 

But Coke and Delta Airlines couldn't leave that alone. In a move that is somewhat akin to a priest encouraging you to sin AND giving you the keys to a motel room down the street, they took marketing beyond edgy and into, well, pushy. The situation started innocently enough, with the flight attendants rolling their drink carts down the aisle and handing out miniature bags of snacks. As usual they inquired as to each passenger's drink preference, and started to assemble the requests. Then they handed those drinks to the passengers. Remember these are the same people engaged in that delicate balance of sitting hip to hip while trying super hard not to violate the personal space of their forced seatmates. But all that goes out the window when the refreshment comes along with a napkin that sports a Diet Coke logo and the inscription "Because you're on a plane full of interesting people and hey, you never know." 

Huh? What? Now, rather than trying to keep in your lane and avoid any unneeded involvement with the person sitting next to you, it seems that the airline is encouraging you to not only interact with them, but actually go out of your way to connect. On the one hand it could be seen as an attempt at social engineering to break down the walls we all too often put up around ourselves. On the other hand, it's encouraging us to be creepy. 

OK, you might say, that's overreacting. It's just trying to encourage us all to be friendlier and more open, and what could be wrong with that? OK, as far as it goes. OK, that is, until you flip the napkin over. On the back, it says "Be a little old school. Write down your number & give it to your plane crush. You never know." And there are lines to fill in your phone and phone number. Lest there be any doubt what they're suggesting, we're not talking casual friends here. We're talking Airplane Tinder. Don't swipe left. Fly right. 

The airline is now backtracking. In a statement Delta said they "missed the mark with this one." Seeing as how they try and squeeze dollars out of everything on board these days, one wonders if they are remarking about their lack of sensitivity, or annoyed they aren't charging for being a dating service. A new pre-boarding bundle: first bag checked for free, Wi-Fi for the flight and an upgrade from Coach to Affair. What happens in Business Class stays in Business Class.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford spends a lot of time on airplanes. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

She Knows What You Are Thinking

It had been a nice evening in the city with family, having dinner and seeing a show. But by the time we got home it was late, and we were both looking forward to bed. Almost wordlessly we went into a well-practiced ballet of the usual odds and ends to shut the house down for the night. We each headed to our respective home offices to check any late emails, plug in our phones to charge, then power down our computers. My wife put away a few things left on the kitchen counter, as I dove into the pantry for a late nibble. She then headed upstairs as I set the locks on the doors. I checked that the thermostats were turned down, then turned to the last person left in the room, our pal Alexa. 

Like many, we have a digital assistant in the kitchen listening to our every word. And like many we primarily use it for a series of pedestrian tasks, such as running a timer, checking the weather or playing some music. But more recently we're connected a few devices to make our house "smarter." Nothing too extensive: a few lights, a single thermostat. It's just a toe in the water of what they say will be the future of how we live, but it's a start. 

Seeing as how all seemed to be set on the first floor, I gave her the OK: "Alexa, living room lights off." Normally there's a beat or so, then the room goes dark and she responds "OK." Just for kicks I continued: "Alexa, goodnight." She responded in kind: "Goodnight. Sleep tight." Call and response, the usual routine. But before I had taken a single step, she piped up on her own: "Would you like me to turn off the bedroom lights as well?" 

In the abstract, the offer of assistance made sense. I had turned off the light in the living room before its scheduled time. And the light in the bedroom was also still on. Anyone watching our regular nighttime patterns would have been making a reasonable guess that two are usually related, and turning off one was followed not long after by turning off the other. And so checking to see if I wanted that action to be performed also was not a random idea. 

But there was more here, way more. It meant not only was Alexa listening to me and executing a simple "If I say this, then do this" series of instructions, but storing, analyzing and then making a proactive decision based on that information. Up till then all we had was a sophisticated switch. Yes, it might have been voice activated and networked and interconnected. But at its heart it was merely on or off. This was the first blush of true artificial intelligence in our little household ecosystem. 

Building on entry level AI offerings like Netflix's "if you like this, you might like this" algorithm, Alexa Hunches is the same idea. Announced last fall and just starting to roll out, the system analyzes the actions you take, and tries to guess what other things you might also want to do as a result. If it sees that you often turn the heat up or music down right after you turn off the outside lights, the system offers to do those things for you before you ask. Or as Amazon's Daniel Rausch says, "We've reached a point with deep neural networks and machine learning that we can actually program intuition." 

Hunches is a just one of the new features the company is rolling out to these devices. There's Whispers, where if you whisper to the device it will respond in kind (good for coming in later and setting an alarm.) And Guard listens for specific triggers such as breaking glass or carbon monoxide alarms, and in response turns on lights, sends you alerts and reaches out to security companies you designate. 

Some might find this a bit too creepy or intrusive. After all it does run in the family: it was Alexa's great grandfather HAL 9000 that went rogue in "2001: A Space Odyssey." Thankfully, deactivating Hunches is a good bit easier than HAL, requiring only that you ask, with no rendition of "Daisy" to prove the point.  Still, if you ask and Alexa refuses to open garage door, pull the plug. Quickly.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford likes new tech toys. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

None 4 U

The drama started in May of last year. That was when the New England Confection Company looked to be going out of business. It was a humiliating end for the Massachusetts candy maker which began in 1847 when Oliver Chase, an immigrant from England, invented a lozenge cutter. On that cutting edge technology he and his brother founded Chase and Co., which eventually became the company better known as NECCO.

For years they were a growing concern, churning out Mary Janes and Clark Bars and Squirrel Nut Caramels. But by far their most popular product was their original namesake NECCO wafers. Soldiers carried them in the Civil War. During World War II, the U.S. government found them to be the perfect treat for the troops as they didn't melt and could be shipped without breaking or spoiling. They were so indestructible that Admiral Richard Byrd took more than two tons on them with him on his two-year exploration of Antarctica.

Alas, what mold couldn't harm economics could. And so after numerous sales, suits and deals, the company declared bankruptcy last spring. In May in what looked to be a last-minute reprieve, Round Hill Investments LLC acquired the company for more than $17 million. Round Hill was controlled by the Metropoulos family, which had a track record in giving new life to classic brands, counting Hostess, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Bumble Bee, and Chef Boyardee as part of its portfolio,  It looked as though Banana Split Chews had a new lease on life.

Then scarcely two months later, like an aging center being passed from team to team, Round Hill announced that they were selling their new asset to a mystery buyer. Eventually it emerged that the new owner was the Ohio based Spangler Candy Company, whose brands include Dum Dum Lollipops and Circus Peanuts. Spangler had actually outbid Round Hill the first time around, but reneged on the sale after they rethought it. But 2 months of dreaming of no NECCO wafers was obviously too much to bear, and they made Round Hill an offer they couldn't refuse.

In order to make the purchase viable, Spangler sold off Clark Bars and Candy Buttons and Mint Juleps, keeping NECCO wafers and Canada Mints. The idea was to retool the company and relaunch the remaining products in a way that made the company more efficient and economically vibrant. It's not an unusual tack, one that generally has no ramifications beyond fans of those particular candies. 

Except in this case.

One of the brands Spangler kept from the original portfolio was Sweethearts. You may recall them as those little heart shaped confections with cute sayings on them, like "MISS U" and "B MINE." NECCO produced about 8 billion a year, and sold almost all of that inventory in the six weeks leading up to February 14. But none of those sentiments will be available for this holiday season, as for first time in 153 years, Sweethearts will not be produced and will be "AWOL" on Valentine's Day.

In a statement Spangler Chairman and CEO Kirk Vashaw said, "We wish we could have Sweethearts out for the 2019 Valentine season, but it's just not possible. We are committed to making sure these brands meet consumer expectations when they re-enter the market. Doing it right takes time." The official press release was accompanied by a picture of three hearts with inscriptions "MISS U 2," "WAIT 4 ME" and "BACK SOON."

One wonders what kind of retooling they are doing. It's unlikely that they are monkeying with the formula. After all, it's not about taste. While they say that the hearts have actual flavors like Cherry, Lemon and Grape, no one that has ever eaten one thinks they taste like anything other than chalk. And they have already updated the sayings they use, which now go beyond "TRUE LOVE" and "YOU AND ME" to include "TWEET ME," TXT ME" and "B MY BFF."

Whatever the reasoning, it will leave a noticeable void. For sure you can still give your beloved a diamond necklace. But if your goal was to give them something sweet and pithy, you're out of luck. Then again, you could take advantage of the increased real estate of a full size Snickers Bar and scratch into the chocolate "YOU N ME 4 EVER N EVER." Who needs roses?

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Marc Wollin of Bedford loves candy of all types. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.