Complex Numbers

Cookie Wars

Here's an article about an important component of life.

    The curious case of the disappearing Hydrox cookies  
Oreo, the Hydrox knockoff, has been accused of burying its competitor by scoring sweetheart deals with grocers. Does it wield too much power over smaller rivals?

Yes, Oreo was a Hydrox knockoff, not the other way around. But that crap happened around 1910. Maybe stop worrying about who was first?

Audrey Peard is searching for an elusive, chocolatey piece of Americana: a package of Hydrox cookies.

Come to think of it, I haven't seen them in a while, either. Can't go to the grocery store without hearing the siren call of Oreos (which I usually ignore because they produced, then yanked, my favorite ones), but haven't seen Hydrox since before I can remember.

She’s visited multiple grocery stores near her home in the Bronx, followed a Facebook group, and even talked to a manager at a production facility in El Segundo, California, about supply shortages.

El Segundo may sound like an obscure California town, but in reality, it's right next to LAX. Hardly obscure.

Hydrox was the original chocolate sandwich cookie, predating Oreo. With a mildly sweet creme and a crunchier cookie that has a darker chocolate taste than its rival, Hydrox developed a reputation as the dessert of the discerning eater. It was, according to legendary food writer Calvin Trillin, the “far superior” cookie.

Sure, but this is the US. We ignore the superior in favor of the cheap and/or flood-marketed. That's kind of our thing; we even apply it to countries.

Hydrox, meanwhile, was discontinued in 2003. It came back in 2015 thanks to Leaf Brands, a San Diego-based company that specializes in reheated nostalgia.

Well, that might explain why I haven't seen any for a while.

Like almost anything else, you can buy Hydrox on Amazon (in bulk).

Don't fucking tell me that. Dammit!

In March 1912, the first batch of Oreos produced for sale was shipped from Nabisco’s six-story Romanesque-style headquarters in Manhattan to a grocer in Hoboken, New Jersey. It would’ve been a historic moment of American innovation if not for an inconvenient fact: Nabisco totally copied the cookie.

Another US thing. See also: Thomas Edison.

A smaller rival, Sunshine Biscuits (then known as The Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company), was started by Jacob and Joseph Loose in 1902.

Now, this is where my inner linguist starts asking questions. Nabisco was originally National Biscuit Company. Obviously, they both mostly made cookies, not biscuits. Except that in British English (and also in French), what we call cookies, they call biscuits. And what we call biscuits aren't technically biscuits at all ("biscuit" comes from Latin words for something like "twice baked"), though obviously they're delicious in their own way. But these were clearly American companies, as evidenced by their locations in New York and Kansas City. So why "biscuits?" Did we only split off from British usage after the watershed moment when someone invented the first delicious creme-filled sandwich biscuit/cookie?

Apparently not.   And it looks like we can blame the Dutch for, among other things, "cookie."

To complicate matters further, some cookies are called crackers.

All of which is to gloss over the fact that it's too bad they didn't stick with Loose-Wiles.

Anyway, the article goes off on a tangent about corporations and unions in the US, before going on with:

In 1908, Sunshine created one of its most popular products, Hydrox.

If you're thinking that's a portmanteau of hydrogen and oxygen, well...

According to company lore, the name stemmed from the elements of water — hydrogen and oxygen — chosen to symbolize the cookie’s cleanliness at a time when materials like chalk and plaster of Paris routinely appeared in baked goods.

I mean, technically they should have called them Carbohydrox, but whatever. Remember, this was before some other marketing convinced people that chemicals are bad, despite everything being made of chemicals.

Sunshine bragged that chemists tested Hydrox for purity and that workers made them at “thousand window” factories with natural light.

Yeah, right.

Hydrox also stood out against Oreo by promoting its more adult taste and kosher ingredients — in advertisements that bordered on erotic.

The "kosher" thing wasn't just to grab the Jewish market, either. It had the cachet of being more "pure" back then, kind of like "all-natural" is today. Whether it was/is or not is up for debate.

The article goes on with history for a while, and I think lays out a compelling case for why Oreos ended up reigning supreme. There's also quite a bit about the anti-competitive world of grocery stores, which I find fascinating.

Usually, doing articles like these makes me hungry. Not this time. All I can think of is the abomination known as Swedish Fish Oreos,   so... no, thanks.