June 27, 2025 • 54 mins
Jordan and Alex discuss the family blood feud that led to the beloved cookie's creation, as well as the physics behind dunking, psychology behind twisting, chemistry behind the cream, and the mystery behind its iconic name. They'll also go deep on the 50+ different varieties, the rumored hidden meanings in the wafer embossing, and some truly gross Oreo-related hazing rituals. (Recorded in 2022.)
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating
facts about your favorite movies, TV shows, music and more.
We are your two doyens of drivel. I'm Alex Heigel and.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
I'm Jordan Runtag.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
And today, Jordan, we are venturing into a bold new
direction for TMI foodstuffs, specifically Oreos, which are celebrating their
one hundred and tenth anniversary this year. I have personally
always thought of Oreos as the season NBA metaphor, the
sixth man of the cookie world, the anchor. You know.
They're not chalky and disgusting like a Chips de Hoy.
(00:47):
They're wantonly sexual like a Nutter butter or snooty like
those high falutin Pepperidge Farm folks. They're the John Stockton
Utah jazz reference of the cookie aisle, all time assist leader,
just happy to be out there with the rest of
the guys, having a good time, playing their best and
helping the team. But Jordan, you you hit me with
a scorching hot take right before we started recording. Would
(01:08):
you like to repeat that for the fine folks out there.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Yeah, you know, I'm not a huge Areos fan, and
I do have strong thoughts on sweets. I don't really drink,
and you tend to find that people who don't drink
have an especially intense sweet tooth. So I can pratle
on about cookies like some people do about brandy or wine,
and I have to say, I don't know if it's
a case of familiarity breeds contempt, but I'm just not
(01:32):
a huge Oreos fan, and the flavors okay, but just
the experience of eating them to me is garbage. I mean,
let's pay say, the cookie itself or the wafer, if
you're being professional, is trash. It's stale, it's crummy, it's
bitter tasting, terrible mouthfeel, if we're getting really professional here.
(01:52):
I'm not a dipper, so maybe that's part of the problem.
Maybe if I dipped, it would be less like you know,
eating gravel. Feel like, no one actually likes the cookie
portion of Oreo. It's all about the cream feeling. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I mean it's the cream, and the cream is fine.
It's sweet, it's vaguely cream tasting, it's sugary, it's sweet.
(02:13):
I don't know. It's fine for me. Oreo is great
as a flavor of ice cream or milkshakes or the
cookies and cream candy bar. That's where the flavor profile
of oreo is great. But the actual experience of eating them, eh,
not for me. I could take them or leave them.
I'll take malamars or their fancy cousin pin wheels any day.
But how about you.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
You know, as someone who used to smoke a lot
of weed, I've had a lot of experience with oreos,
all kinds of oreos, the peanut butter. Also, you know,
as longtime listeners of the show will know, I grew
up in central Pennsylvania, so I have eaten my fair
share of chocolate covered and or deep fried oreos at
the state fairs.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
That I've never had. I've never actually had that, despite.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
My disgusting Just why it's awful? Just put yourself into
like a painful state of food coma and or diabetic shock. Yeah,
they're bad. I don't know why people do that to themselves. Well,
folks from the Vicious family feud at the heart of
the cookies invention to the insane process of making that
(03:11):
famous filling kosher certified in the late nineties to the
definitive scientific proof regarding the distribution of said filling to
the high school seniors who got in trouble for shoving
oreos up there. But that was Jordan's edition. Here's everything
you didn't know about oreos. The tangled web of oreos
(03:36):
actually begins in a bit of family slash corporate battles.
I did not know this. Around the turn of the
nineteenth century, biscuits were big business in America. Did you
know this?
Speaker 1 (03:47):
I did not know this.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
No.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
I know that they were basically trying to make biscuits
a thing over here in the way that they were
in the UK for tea time. Yes, I think that
was kind of the whole idea, was that they were
trying to create a market need where there was not
over here.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yes. And so in the late nineteenth century, two brothers,
Jacob and Joseph Leos, bought a controlling interest in the
Coral Cracker and Confectionery Company in Kansas City, Missouri. So
I can't believe you read that tech neither can I.
Particulars of this are not interesting. The point is that
Jacob decides that a bunch of Midwest bakeries can form
(04:25):
together and become a regional powerhouse to compete with those
snooty coastal elites Big Biscuit in New York. And So
in eighteen ninety he hires a lawyer named Adolphus Green
to oversee a merger that creates the American Biscuit and
Manufacturing Company, which becomes the second largest corporate bakery in America.
Jacob names himself president, appoints his brother Joseph to the
(04:47):
board of directors, and Adolphus to general counsel. Meanwhile, in
eighteen eighty nine, a guy named William H. Moore combines
a number of other bakeries to start the New York
Biscuit Company. More is more lest the archetype for what
would become the kind of nineteen eighties. Patrick Bateman, corporate
writer ac mergers and acquisition guys. His whole thing was
(05:08):
buying and consolidating companies. He lost one point one million
at one point in an attempt to buy the Carnegie
Steel Company, but subsequently tried again with the assistants of
JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller and succeeded creating US Steel,
which is one of the archetypal industrial mega corporations of
the twentieth century. So this is the guy who's behind
(05:29):
New York Biscuit.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
So moral the stories, you don't want to mess with
New York Biscuit.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
It sounds like no, no, no no. So American Biscuit,
New York Biscuit, and a third company called the United
States Bacon Company. These guys didn't have just terrible names,
battled each other for years in what broadsheet journalists actually
dubbed the Biscuit Wars at the time, and it got
so bad that Jacob had to take a step back
(05:53):
from American Biscuit for health reasons, and Joseph, now in control,
decides to make peace and merge with the other two
companies in eighteen ninety eight, a move Jacob vehemently protested
against from his sick bed.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Isn't this like the plot of The Godfather very much?
Speaker 2 (06:11):
So?
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Well, yeah, Sonny trying to make peace with the other families.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
While how they massacred my boy. Yeah uh, he said
that about Chipshy later. So the merger nevertheless goes through
and the three companies become the National Biscuit Company. Nah bisco,
I get it. There's no way to say that that
doesn't sound like a cult indoctrination. Forever forever, bah ram
(06:36):
you nah Bisco. Anyway, Joseph installs himself uh lawyer Adolphus
dream of.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Us nah Bisco and some other ex buddies of Jacob's,
and the company builds an enormous factory in what is
now the Chelsea Market and is well on its way
to national dominance.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, this building in Manhattan is absolutely massive. It's a
full city block, and that stretch of Ninth Avenue is
named Orio Way in its honor. And interesting point of fact,
the birthplace of the Oreo is now owned by Google.
They were just the building in twenty eighteen for two
point four billion.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
That's what That's a spicy cookie.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
That's a little block of meatpacking district Manhattan costs, I suppose.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Boy.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
So, Nabisco launches the wildly popular Barnums animal crackers in
nineteen three, although that is like most things this company does,
a ripoff of an existing British cookie. Fig Newton's also
come up around this time, and then in nineteen twelve
both Laura Dunes and Oreos so quite a batting average
(07:46):
out of the gate.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
But all those cookies are trash. I mean, especially Fignutons
are popular to eat at the beach because it already
tastes like you're eating sand, So now I can tell
when there's already sand in it. Yeah, I mean, Laura Dunes,
I can't believe those are still being made. I mean,
I don't think there's anybody under the age of seventy
who eats those. I hate all these cookies. Oreos gets
a pass just out of nostalgia alone. But yeah, interesting
(08:10):
fact about the sort of democratic way that the BISCO
goes about developing products. There was an article that appeared
in a nineteen thirty one issue of The New Yorker
written by E. B. White, the man who wrote Charlotte's Web,
and he describes his visit to the BISCO headquarters in
New York and the very kind of casual way that
employees could suggest new cookie ideas. Presumably there was like
(08:32):
a suggestion box, and then the bakers would make them
and then test these products out by basically just leaving
them out in the breakroom and watching to see how
many were eaten. And EB White writes in this piece,
a baker makes up a trial batch off the new
model and sends them upstairs, where they're placed in an
open rack by the water cooler. Employees may help themselves.
(08:52):
Everything is informal. There are no charts or tables. After
a few days of elapse, the heads of the department
simply meet and talk the thing over. As soon as
the cookie has passed its test, it gets a name.
We'll talk more about the Orio name later. That's how
Pablo Escobar ran his business too.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
But Jacob in the meantime heals up and from his deathbed,
rises with a vengeance and launches another new biscuit company
with another guy and calls it the Loose Wiles Biscuit Company.
They really got to work on these names. But with
the burning hatred and drive born of this Cane and
(09:30):
Able esque story, he brings the Loose Wiles Biscuit Company
up into the number two biscuit slot in the country
behind Nobisco, largely on the strength of one cookie, a
shortbread and cream sandwich with an ornate stamp design called Hydrus.
So we have to backtrack here because the quiet part
loud about Oreos is that they are a total ripoff
(09:51):
of Hydrugs. They came out in nineteen oh eight. NBISCO
files a trademark on Oreo in nineteen twelve, and it
is granted in nineteen thirteen. The first Oreo was sold
on March sixth, nineteen twelve, to a grosser in Hoboken,
New Jersey.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
They were sold by weight, originally at a cost of
two dollars and thirty five cents for nine and a
quarter pounds. The oreos cost a dollar eady five and
the tin they came in costs another fifty cents. The
original oreos were ever so slightly larger than the ones
we enjoyed today, and most importantly to me, they went
on sale just a month before the Titanic set sale
(10:27):
on her maiden voyage meeting. There's quite possibly remains of
early Oreo packaging on the ocean floor, although it departed
from the UK, so it doubtful got over there, but
people on board the Titanic may have been aware of oreos,
and that's good enough for me.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
They were eating hydrugs. You know.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
I just want to recap for a second, just because
this story, mostly due to the really terrible corporate names,
can be a little hard to follow, but it's amazing.
So two brothers start a cookie company, a cookie conglomerate.
The older brother works so hard that he then has
to take a step back. He's he's worked himself to
the bone. His younger brother makes peace with all the
(11:04):
competing other cookie companies and they merge against the older
brother's wishes. The older brother gets well, and he's so
angry that his younger brother has sold his own company
out from underneath him that he makes a competing company
to take them on. And this competing company has made
basically what's the prototype of Oreo, known as hydrox. I
(11:25):
just think that's amazing. Canaan Abele doesn't even begin to
cover it.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Here's what's funny about this. Hydrugs were far more successful
than oreos at the time. The real power behind the
throne at this point is the Jewish community. In nineteen
twenty four, Loose Wiles, the company behind hydrox, partnered with
the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America to create
the country's first kosher certification program, which, because hydroxes don't
(11:54):
use lard in their cream whereas oreos did, made hydroxes
enormously popular among the Jewish community, and this contributed to
their early market dominance. Nibisco attempted to hitch the Oreo
name to a bunch of their other more successful products
in displays and advertisements. There's a wonderful anecdote of this
copy from Serious Eats. One in nineteen fourteen, one stores
(12:18):
found itself with a surfeit of Oreos to the tune
of seven hundred tins, so they slashed the price and
literally berated their customers into trying to buy them. Yesterday,
we advertised those splendid oreos and they were a great bargain.
While we sold a few, they didn't move anything like
we expected. It's simply a case of you not knowing
(12:39):
what a fine biscuit delicacy they are. The customer, they're
literally the principal skinner meme. Is this cookie bad? No,
it's the customer who is wrong. I love that, But
you know they hydrouck Span. These guys, they bungled an
early lead man. It's rough, yeah, I mean for starters.
(13:01):
There's that truly horrendous name, Hydrox. It sounds terrible on
the page, It looks terrible. It looks like a Greek
monster with like six heads.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
It's awful. They were looking for a product name that
would evoke purity and goodness and good lord. They failed,
but they.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Maybe they succeeded too much and just evoked antiseptic sterility.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Right because I guess the name hydros came from the
atomic elements of water, hydrogen and oxygen high DROs. And
this was surprisingly given how ugly it sounds and how
it does not roll off the tongue in any way,
it was actually a really common name at the time.
There was the hydrox arated table water. There was hydrox
(13:49):
ice cream, Oh God, and hydrox ginger ale, and as
you mentioned, has a very antiseptic medical connotation and not
something that you want connected with confections. So perhaps because
of the whole Warring Brothers thing for fifty years, loose
Wiles really leaned on the whole copycat aspect of oreos.
They were really promoting hydrogs as the original beware of imitators.
(14:13):
There was one ad that featured a bear cub literally
crying over stolen crease, and their ad copy use words
like first and the finest, and the original and the
only and the classic and Warren consumers don't be fooled
by lookalikes.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
So much finger wagging, I love it or did, however,
I throat cookie World. Yeah, exactly, Jacob. The same year
Jacob dies, the older brother who quit his body not
even cold in the grave, Oreo sends out a series
of ads that would change the world. With no exaggeration.
I say this. They promote the classic Oreo twist method
(14:55):
of eating. It's on street cars. I believe it is
the big one saying everybody's doing the Oreo twist. Maybe
they didn't say that. I don't know, but that's where
the twist dates back to his nineteen twenty three coincidentally,
the same year the brother dies. I just this whole
thing is so Shakespearean.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
They did the Oreo twist on his grave.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Hey. By twenty fourteen, the Hydros name had fallen so
far that Keebler Kellogg's let the trademark lapse and it
was snapped up by Leaf Brands, who four years later
filed a complaint with the FTC against Oreos, alleging that
they hid Hydrox companies from customers on store shelves.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Oh, they hid Hydrox cookies from customers.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
That was the basis of the suit. I don't know
if it was actually settled, but man talk about with
my last breath. I stab at THEE from Hell's Dark Heart,
I stab at thee. They went. They just Hydrox versus Oreo.
Few to the century.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Wow, Yeah, I mean this was the Coke Pepsi of
the early twentieth century. We're going to take a quick break,
but we'll be right back with more, too much of
in just a moment.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Wow. With hydrux dead and buried, Oreos were free to blossom.
So shortan tell us about that.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Yes, the Oreo went my many variations of their famous
name over the years. When they were first introduced in
nineteen twelve, they were simply known as the Oreo biscuit,
and then by nineteen twenty one the cookie embraced its
shape and it was renamed the Oreo Sandwich, and in
nineteen thirty seven the name was changed again to the
distinctively high brow Oreo cream Sandwich. And I was saying
(16:40):
earlier at the top of the episode this was a
way to play off the British biscuits that were served
at tea time, and upon their initial launch, Oreos were
marketed as fairly high end. There's this amazing bit of
ad copy from I think around nineteen twelve, when they
were first unveiled and it describes the Oreo as quote
two beautifully embossed chalk flavored wafers with a rich cream filling,
(17:03):
which is over selling Oreos slightly. And the final official
name changed to Oreos came in nineteen seventy four when
the cookie became known as the Oreo Chocolate Sandwich Cookie,
or Oreo for short, and that's its official name to
this very day. Anyway, while we're on the topic of names,
it's still anybody's guess where the term Oreo came from,
(17:24):
but there are many theories. It could be derived from
the French word for gold, which was an early decorative
element for the Oreo packaging. But here's a grab bag
of other explanations that are out there. There's one theory
that says that the name stemmed from the hill shaped
test version that never made it to store shelves. I
guess the cream was piled up like a little mountain
(17:45):
and that inspired this cookie prototype to be named Oreo,
which is the Greek word from mountain. So that's one theory.
There's another theory that says that the word Oreo is
a combination of the ra from cream and sandwiching. It
just like the cookie between the two o's in chocolate.
Oh from chocolate, ree from cream, oh from chocolate. It's
(18:06):
a verbal visual pun. It's not I I you don't know,
I might.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
I just want to say I want you to do
you're doing like the drunk don draper like hand gesturing is.
It's just like the two o's and chocolate. It makes
makes story. Roger Sterling throws up in the lobby.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
I mean that's probably how this was name.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Right, They're all on cocaine. Just zut it up, like,
what should we call it?
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Areo h very number three? It stands for a rexigenic,
which is a medical term for substances that stimulate the appetite.
I would tend to want to dismiss this out of hand,
but considering hydrox.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
Was his competitive name, uh maybe, Well, way do you
get to the plant conspiracy theory, which is the next one?
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Yes, yes, this is a really good one. This is
your personal favorite and probably mine too. The decorations on
the top of hydrox the hydrox cookie at that point
included a mountain laurel. And guess what genus of plant
they belonged to? The mountain laurel. That's right, Oreo, Daphni, Oreo,
daphne uh. And this was bolstered by the fact that
(19:24):
someone in Nibisco clearly had a thing for plants. Of
the cookies that Nibisco offered in nineteen thirteen, there's the Avena,
the lotus, the helicon, the zephyrett, the zatona, the aola,
the ramona, and Oreo, and those are all Latin or
Botany names for different kinds of plants.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
I just love the idea that there's like one drunk
guy in the Nobisco copywriting thing. He's like, I'm gonna
name for plants no one will know. While we're on
the topic of that embossing that beautiful lorel wreath, it
kind of looks like a manhole cover at this point.
When they launched, Oreos used a much more organic plant
derived wreath for the emboss adding two pairs of turtle
(20:07):
doves in a nineteen twenty four redesign. The contemporary Oreo
stamp was introduced in nineteen fifty two and it has
remained unchanged ever since.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Every Oriole cookie contains ninety ridges, twelve flowers, twelve dashes,
and twelve dots. I feel like that's going to be
a great trivia question at some bar trivia somewhere.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
So remember that it's probably some kind of satanic numbering thing.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
We'll get to that.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Many people on the internet credit a man named William
Turnier who started as a mailboy at Nabisco with the
four leaf clover and serrated edge design. But Nabisco is
cagy about it. They will only confirm that a man
by that name worked for the company during that time
as a design engineer. In a very granular bit of
Internet dorkery, in the comments section of a twenty eleven
(20:55):
New York Times magazine article about the Oreo embossing, a
guy aiming to be William Turnier's son, Bill said that
the original blueprints for the cookie are in his possession
in North Carolina.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Did you go into the comment section of this twenty
eleven New York Times magazine article about the oreo and bossing,
I just protu scanning all the comment good.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Magician never reveals his secrets, Okay.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
But William Turnier's son, the aforementioned Bill, was interviewed by
Mental Floss, and he said that the design on oreos
quote goes back to monks who used it on the
bottom of manuscripts they copied in medieval times. It was
a sign of craft saying they did the best they could.
And there are some out there Internet sleuths, most likely
(21:41):
who have noted the similarities between the Oreo design and
the graphics used by the Freemasons and the Knights Templar,
thus linking the beloved cookie with the Crusades, which I
did not expect when we started this episode.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Bill also claimed that his dad modified the animal Cracker's box.
His contribution to that was adding the grass along the bottom,
designed the logo for Nutter Butters and Milk Bones, and
may have contributed to the design for the Rich Cracker.
William Senior left the East Coast and settled in Salt
Lake City, where his grave marker features an Oreo. Bizarrely enough,
(22:20):
given their seeming silence on crediting him, Bill claims that
Nabisco contacted his dad at one point to help confirm
aspects of the Oreo's design in order to build a
lawsuit against a company making a copycat cookie in Trinidad
and Tobago. Turn about his fair play Nabisco, But the
(22:41):
only thing in the official Craft Archives four turnire is
the receipt of a Suggestion Award in nineteen seventy two
for an idea that increased the production of nilla wafers
on company machinery by thirteen percent. So the company reaches
out to him. They're like, hey, do you have the
original blueprint for Oreos someone is trying to copy as
(23:03):
a Trinidad and Tobaggo. He's like, sure, I'll help you up,
and they still like disavow his credit for that. But yeah,
So between Oreos, milk bones, nut butters, animal crackers, ritz crackers,
and increasing the productivity of nilla wafers in nineteen seventy
two by whopping thirteen percent, William Turnier maybe the secret
MVP of the Oreos story. I just wanted to do.
(23:26):
I want to do my transition. Here is ding doom
ding ding ding ding dom ding ding all right on
my way? Dum. I would say that was terrible cut
that that might went over much better in my head.
The name of the heading is Ori on my Way,
like the song that's I'm rust send me on my Way.
(23:48):
That's that's not Rusted Root, is it? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (23:51):
I saw Rusted Root as a kid. No way, Yeah,
how'd that go for you's I'm sitting here talking to you.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Great, all right, that digression well and truly dead. Now
we arrive at the real heart of the matter.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Yes, the Oreo filling really the only good part of Oreos,
if we're all being honest with ourselves.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
This is the most heated you have been about anything
in the months we've been doing this podcast.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
I mean, I think there's there's no reason why Oreos
should be as big as they are. There's there's some
part in effectively every way, just get on with it.
But yes, the Oreo filling. The man credited with its
modern incarnation is named mister Sam Porcello. First of all,
did you know that there's a reason why cream in
(24:42):
Oreo is spelled cr e e because it contains no
dairy and therefore cannot be marketed using the spelling of cream,
which implies that cash is everywhere around me. Also, while
we're on the topic of cream, each original Oreo cookie
is twenty nine percent cream and seventy one percent cookie.
(25:05):
That is the official ratio, and Oreo bakeries make more
than one hundred and twenty three thousand tons of cream
to fill their cookies each year. That's incredible.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
I want you to Viking funeral me into the Oreo cream.
Event it just put me on a pire and sent
me on fire in the middle of one of those.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
The gentleman who's credited with creating the modern incarnation of
the Oreo cream mister Sam Porcello. He arrived at Nabisco
in nineteen fifty nine and worked there for thirty four years,
retiring in nineteen ninety three. Porcello's actual title was Principal Scientist,
but his son described him as one of the world's
(25:45):
foremost experts on coco, which eventually earned him the nickname
the autorific. Really, mister Oreos.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
This is where it gets really wild. Sarah Joyner is
this woman who uncovered this. It basically makes journalists look bad?
Is this whole story? So, but go ahead continue. I
just want to credit her because she really did the
leg work here.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Yes, ground zero for this whole theory that Porcello is
the guy who created the modern Oreo filling appears in
his twenty twelve obituary in the New York Daily News,
which was then picked up by the blogging community around
the world. Yes, this woman Sarah Joyner researching Pacello in
twenty twenty, reached out to Mondelez, which is the parent
(26:28):
company of Oreo, and they told her it would be
inaccurate to say that Sam Porcello invented the modern Oreo cream,
and a former Oreo rep she was exchanging emails with
said that she hadn't even heard of Porcello. So there's
some kind of erasure going on here at this time.
Orio really isn't like crediting the people who are behind.
(26:49):
You got the guy who invented the embossing, you get
the guy who invented the modern cream. Something's going on here,
But it turns out that the real story is, as ever,
very technical and boring. Porcello what's largest contribution to the
Orio cookie was in modifying the chemical composition of the
filling so that it was solid at room temperature but
melts ninety eight degrees as in when it hits your mouth.
(27:12):
But he shared those developments with three other food scientists,
and basically the credit he gets for being mister Oreo
pretty much comes down to the work of his own
family's hagiography since his death.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
This whole thing is so fascinating to me because if
you look up Oreo and you look up oreo filling.
It's like lodged in seo. But the original New York
Daily News link is dead and you can only find
it through the Internet news archives. So the only link
to this story is now in like it's like playing telephone.
It's only in blogs aggregating that story. So one is
(27:44):
on Time, the Time magazine website. And so this woman,
Sarah Joyner is researching this and it basically I think
what happened was this New York Daily News guy knew
or heard or got a tip about this guy dying
and just interviewed his family, and his family was like,
oh yeah, Dad was like, mister Orio, he invented the
(28:05):
oreo filling. But the more you dig into it, the
more it turns out that, like he just refined the
formula with a bunch of really boring food chemistry things
related to filling solubility, and he retired nineteen ninety three, which,
you know, we get into this next thing. They take
out lard in nineteen eighty four, and they take out
(28:27):
the vegetable oils they replaced the lard with in two
thousand and six, So by twenty twenty, his formula was
already two recipes out of date. And this woman, this
Sarah Joyner, is it's very sweet because she's like talking
to his son and she's like, oh yeah, like they
wouldn't have kept up with the formula changes. Like to them,
(28:48):
their dad is still the guy who invented the Oreo filling.
Like their dad is still mister Oreo. They didn't mean
to mislead anyone. It was just like lazy journalism. Nobody
bothered to fact check that. And it's just I don't know,
I find it very sweet in like this American life
sort of way. Like this family from Jersey is just
like their dad is mister Oreo to them, and they
(29:08):
told he always will be and he always will be.
And they told a single paper and the paper didn't
bother to fact check it, and it's become fact anyway.
I just want to tell everyone that I titled this
next section a Rabbi and a blowtorch walk into a
cookie factory. Remember how I said when hydrugs were hugely
popular with the Jewish community because they were kosher, so Oreo,
in their apparently never ending quest to bury all memory
(29:31):
of their predecessor and salt the Earth, decided to alter
their recipe and go kosher in nineteen ninety four, years
after Burchello retired, or the year after Brichella retired.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Also nineteen eighty four, at a time when hydrocks barely exist.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Yeah right, they're like someone was just it's like a
Monty Burns, Like one of the last surviving executives is
like crush jocks. This is so fascinating to me. This guy,
Joe Regenstein, professor of food science at Cornell and director
of the Cornell Kosher and Lull Food Initiative, called this
process probably the most expensive conversion of a company from
(30:06):
non kosher to kosher in in two thousand and eight interview.
And this apparently started when a number of ice cream
companies wanted to start using oreos in their products which
were kosher and couldn't because of the lar so. Nibisco
owned approximately one hundred baking ovens, each about three hundred
feet in length, and they all had to be converted
to kosher, the process that literally involved a rabbi crawling
(30:28):
through them with a blow torch. Because the ovens were
not kosher and baking is a dry, high heat process,
each one of these units had to be heated to
red hot temperatures. Regenstein said, you need to use a
blow torch to clean away the forbidden materials, so I
tell my therapist. Additionally, each oven contained a soft plastic
(30:49):
belt that cost upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars at a time, and each of these needed to
be replaced. This process took three and a half years,
wound up in nineteen ninety seven, after which I guess
they got Zelda Reubinstein from the Poltergeist movie to come
in and be like, this house is clean.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
This all brings us to a larger question, how do
you make an oreo? Well, obviously, the official ingredient list
is a closely guarded secret, and if we told you,
we'd have to kill you. But there are eleven major ingredients.
The hours follows sugar, unbleached flour, canola oil, high fructose
corn syrup, baking soda, corn start, soile, liketin, vanillin, and chocolate.
(31:32):
And in an article celebrating the seventy fifth birthday of
oreos from back in nineteen eighty six, this piece describes
five hundred degree gas ovens as long as football fields,
capable of cranking out two thousand cookies a minute, and
to quote the piece an oreo takes less than an
hour to make a half hour of mixing in bins
(31:52):
the size of Volkswagen beetles, and another twenty minutes on
the conveyor belts being pressed into shape and then bobbing
along from the third floor to the first, through ovens
and cooling tunnels, under the icing drum, and into machines
that stack and deal oreos like cards into cellophane packages.
But the five folks at Nabisco have a rigid approach
to quality control, and there are quote bins the size
(32:16):
of hot tubs filled with broken oreo wafers, and some
of these are ground up and reused in the batter,
while others are sold to ice cream companies to be
crumbled and mixed into their ice cream. But about five
percent of the cookies wind up b and R or
broken and rejected and thrown away, And says haven't we
(32:36):
all been b and R at one time or another?
Speaker 4 (32:41):
As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with
more too much information after these messages. Next step we
have a little section called Karma commer Comma, Karma, karma
cavig Nope.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
That was terrible. Don't I swear to God if you
don't cut that. They replaced the lard with partially hydrogenated
vegetable oil, and then they subsequently replace that in two
thousand and six with healthier and more expensive non hydrogenated
vegetable oil. Folks, if you're waiting for an explanation for
what those terms are, wait longer, because I don't have it.
This came after the FDA in two thousand and three
(33:23):
had announced new labeling requirements that required manufacturers to list
transfats on their packaging.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
Which are closely linked to heart disease. Especially They're fine
with doing it until they're being ordered to actually, well.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Yeah, they're doing it, yeah, every single company in the world.
So at some point this change in formula gave rise
to the claim that Oreos are vegan, which is like
one of the most commonly recited talking points about them.
But according to at least one check of their UK website,
there's just the possibility of cross contaminations with dairy products
at their facilities, and one extremely hard line vegan blog
(33:57):
that I found they contacted the OREO directly in twenty
ten and got the answer that, unfortunately for the militant
vegans among us. Some of the enzymes used to condition
dough in processed goods are animal derived, so you've got
the blood of microscopic organisms on your hands. And some
(34:19):
sugar suppliers use the animal derived natural charcoal bone jar
in their sugar cane refining process. So depending on your
tolerance for animal products, and we are literally talking parts
per million. But if you're nothing, no shame. If you're
one of those people who's like, I want everything, I
need to be completely free of the blood of animals,
I don't think Oreos your ticket there. Speaking of enormous
(34:43):
multinational corporations, there is an entertaining story of some corporate
subterfuge that entangled Oreo recently. Recently ish in twenty fourteen,
two California men were sentenced to prison time after stealing
the formula for a chemical whitening agent called typ titanium
dioxide from American chemical company du Pont. So this titanium
(35:05):
oxide dioxide from DuPont specifically is like the purest, like
most sought after white pigment in the world, and it's
jealously guarded, and so these guys broke in there and
sold the formula to Pengang Group, a Chinese company that
had been unsuccessfully trying to buy this formula for over
twenty million dollars. The conviction of these men in the
(35:26):
court documents subsequently leaked to the fact that Oreo used
this chemical to whiten their filling and had hit it
from the ingredients list, which caused some concern because recent
studies have flagged it as a carcinogen. So all is
not as pure white as the driven filling.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
And speaking of oreos and countries with communist ties with
whom we have a troubled relationship, did you know that
oreos apparently weren't officially available in Russia until twenty fifteen?
Did you?
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Did you?
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Did you.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Look at me when I'm talking to you?
Speaker 1 (36:11):
China got them a little earlier in nineteen ninety six,
but they tanked when they were first released, to the
point that they actually considered withdrawing Oreos from Chinese stores
all together, but instead in the Bisco parent company at
the time, Kraft decided to take a very ironically democratic
approach and ask the Chinese consumers what they didn't like
(36:33):
about Oreos so they could adapt them for that market,
And after receiving feedback, they invented a new kind of
Oreo to appeal to China, and it's more like a wafer.
It's four layers of a crispy cookie with a vanilla
or chocolate cream center in the middle, not unlike a pirouette.
You know, those kind of long cigar shaped things. Yeah,
(36:53):
it's like that. It's very, very, very different from the
Oreo we know in love. By two thousand and six,
this Oreo wafer had become the best selling biscuit in China,
just after a decade after they were considering withdrawing from
the market altogether. They were now number one and Kraft
expanded the production of this adapted cookie into other parts
of Asia, Australia and even Canada. And they were all
(37:16):
sorts of interesting international flavors of oreos. There is blueberry
ice cream and coconut delight in Indonesia, Argentina has a
duo flavor Dulce de leche and banana, and China has
green tea flavored and mango. And in August of twenty eighteen,
they released two savory flavored Oreo fillings, hot chicken wing
(37:38):
and wasabi, which Jesus Christ. This leads us to our
patented section on gross Oreo flavors.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
All right, so the original failure was a lemon I
think they made lemon moringe. They call it lemon morine
Oreo in nineteen twenties, which discontinued.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
I think that was released alongside like the chocolate Oreo
when they first dropped in nineteen twelve.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Satists Golden Oreos are vanilla cookies with the same vanilla
cream as the original Oreos. Golden chocolate cream oreos, known
as the quote uh oh Oreo until two thousand and seven,
are the reverse of the original cookie vanilla cookies chocolate
cream frosting. But here's what you folks have been waiting for.
A semi complete list of other Oreo flavors, running the
(38:22):
gamut from mildly offbeat to fully disgusting. There's the famous
birthday cake oreos good, Swedish fish, bad cream, sickle, banana
split cream, really bad, Neapolitan.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
I don't even know what triple double means. I guess
that's triple stuff.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Yeah, yeah, good, good best so far. Candy corn No,
I don't like candy corn as a standalone thing. Oreo
as a subpar cookie coconut fudge. Sure, aren't those just
hop lungs or dosy does or whatever from the growth
cut cookies? Oh no, those are samoas and those are
way better. But that's fine.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Gingerbread, sure, candy cane, white fudge covered Okay, yeah, I
don't even know how you do this. Cookies and cream oreos.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
I don't either, because that's cookies and cream is Oreo flavored,
so it's an Oreo flavored oreo.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
I know a cursive oreo. No, I've gone across side
root for your float. No watermelon, terrible, marshmallow crisp.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
I don't understand that.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
No caramel, apple, no lime aide. God, there's definitely Yeah,
I mean pumpkin spice. You have to That was good?
Speaker 1 (39:30):
That was good? Yeah, okay, it goes very good.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Cookie dough, Yeah, it's fine. Red velvet cotton candy.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Sure, s'mores cinnamon bone, which is not on here was
the best.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Oh have you had the churro shaped oreos? No, I
think they're just those. The flavors are the same, they're
just shaped like churros.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
Oh I have seen those? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, No, I
haven't had those yet. Actually, I haven't had most of these.
I'm just judging from the name. If you missed out
on the chance to see these these limited edition Oreo
flavors on store shelves, you're in luck. There was an
exhibit at the Museum of Failure in Los Angeles which
(40:14):
has most of these flavors, although the exhibit might have
closed by now. It's also Coca Cola flavored Oreo, which
I don't remember seeing that a synergy thing. Yeah, somebody
got paid.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Drunk John Draper right.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
And hit the table. And you know, I've often wondered
in those twilight hours when I can't sleep and I'm
pondering all the things that are going wrong in my life,
and to try to make it so that I can't
actually have a few moments of blissful slumber before I
have to wake up and face another day of compiling
these insanely researched episodes. I think about, why, why with
(40:54):
the good folks at Nibisco flood the market with these
truly grotesque flavors Oreos more than fifty at this point,
more often than not disgusting. Well, apparently there's a method
to their madness. GQ interviewed a Coronell University behavioral economist
named David just to explain this phenomenon. The key is
(41:15):
that Nabisco's not trying to introduce the flavors for long
term consumption. He says, you build in this idea of
really tacky flavors, and that sort of builds this relationship
to the consumer who likes to sort of check out
these kitchy Oreos, he explained, and as an added bonus,
many younger consumers basically give the company free pr by
(41:36):
posting these new flavor reviews on social media. So David
just describes this approach by Oreos as quote, building a
personality behind its brand.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
I love them. Do you buy that? Sounds like corporate
portions to me?
Speaker 1 (41:49):
I mean I buy it. I think it's a cheap
and easy ole, relatively cheap and easy way of market
testing new flavors that they can maybe enter into the mainstream.
And also, yeah, that's actually I thought I hell of
a lot more about Oreos when they introduced some bizarre
new flavor that more often than not I was curious
about trying than I would have It was just the
same old thing that had been around for one hundred
(42:11):
and ten years.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
So yeah, maybe, yeah, true all right, KGI good for them. Uh. Then,
of course Oreos oreo O's cereal launched in teen ninety seven,
discontinued in two thousand and seven everywhere other than South Korea,
and relaunched ten years later. And speaking of twenty seventeen,
Virginia based the Veil Brewing Company released a version of
(42:35):
their chocolate milk stout called a horn Swoggler that was
infused with actual Oreo cookies. I haven't tried it, don't
know how I feel about it, don't care. Uh, I'm
not going to Virginia for chocolate stuff, even if it
does have I can't believe it's taken us as long
to get to double stuff. Yeah, but like many things
(42:57):
at the heart of America, it is a lot featuring
not actually double but closer to one point eight six
times as much stuff. Those date back to nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Apparently it was like a high school class that actually
crunched the numbers on that and figured out that it
wasn't actually double stuffed. It was like a big story.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
A couple of years ago we mentioned the triple stuff,
but that was not the biggest Oreo nineteen eighty four
Oreo introduced the Big Stuff varietal, which is about ten
times the size of regular Oreo Wow. Sold individually. Each
Big Stuff contained two hundred and fifty calories, which that's
actually which I thought thirteen grams of fat had tracks.
(43:41):
I saw an anecdote earlier that it took someone like
twenty minutes to eat one at a sustainable pace.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
Well, yeah, because it's like it's probably like saltines your
mouth from a cookie, it's gets so dry. It's probably
hard to.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
Eat three inches in diameter. That can possibly be right?
Speaker 1 (43:56):
How thick is it?
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Oh? Yeah, I guess that's true.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
Okay, So let's say six on top, six on the bottom,
or five on top. Okay, I can see that how
that would work. The ad for the Big Stuff is
on YouTube and it's pretty great, and naturally the jingle
is a riff on Gen Nights Mister Big Stuff, because
of course, and hell Oreo could afford it.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Well.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
We mentioned earlier at the top of the episode that
the classic Oreo twist behavior has been part of the
brand's identity from very early on, back in the twenties.
But what does your preference for Oreo consumption patterns say
about you? Well, according to one widely disseminated study, and
we use that term loosely done by craft. In two
(44:41):
thousand and four, they studied the habits of two thousand
oreo eaters. Dunkers are supposed to be quote energetic, adventurous,
and social, while twisters are quote sensitive, emotional, artistic, and trendy.
And finally, biers are quote easygoing, self confident and optimistic.
(45:04):
That this is probably a bad time to ask which
one are you?
Speaker 4 (45:12):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (45:14):
Is there a pithy phrase for when you just reach
your hand into a bag of loose, crumbled ones and
just kind of shove a fist full in your mouth.
Your bag is balanced on your stomach and you're watching
Northern Exposure on a laptop instead of going on to
work because you can't raise your head that day? Is
(45:35):
there a word for that?
Speaker 1 (45:36):
That's the depression technique of eating oreos. I mean, I
don't understand the when you twist it apart. Are you
supposed to lick the center because you can't lick the
cream because it's solid?
Speaker 2 (45:49):
Well, you know, we have mister sam Porcello to think
for that, right, But if you hold your tongue, yeah,
like an art show exactly, you just hold it up
to your tongue until the body temperature heats it up
in a slide it off that I have no idea
what I'm talking about. I think honestly, like in all
of my lockdown Bodega snack runs, I think they got
(46:11):
nutter butters like everything. I'm not at like a do
both of us not like cornes? Weird thing to come
up an hour eight into this podcast.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
They're fine.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
No.
Speaker 1 (46:24):
To me, it's like the sprite of cookies. It's like
that's what you have at the party when there's nothing
else there, and.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
You'll have it, but like, just feel something anything.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the love that people have for oreos,
science has gotten involved more than once. In the late nineties,
Len Fisher, physics professor at the University of Bristol, claimed
decades old mathematical formula describing capillary action, which is the
phenomenon that describes how liquids cling to dry surfaces, could
predict the perfect dunk time for a cookie, and using
(46:57):
a formula from American scientist E. W. You wash burn
and testing with ink blots first, he described the perfect
amount of time for dipping quote regular British biscuits at
three and a half to five seconds. Crucially, though, he
did not test oreos, and so in twenty sixteen, members
(47:17):
of the Utah State University's Splash Lab stepped up to
the plate and corrected this grievous error in a test
of Oreos chips, ahoy nut or butters, and gram crackers.
They dipped the cookies halfway in two percent milk for
half a second to seven seconds, and after dunking, the
team weighed the treats and measured how much milk had
(47:39):
been absorbed. The results, I know you're dying to know.
Oreos absorbed fifty percent of their potential liquid weight in
just one second. After two seconds they absorbed eighty percent,
and the number flat line briefly for a second, and
after the fourth second the cookie maxed out. It absorbed
all its possible milk. So if you were a dunk
(48:00):
your oreos for more than four seconds, you're wasting your
precious time on this planet. So do with that what
you will. But for those taking their dipping seriously, which
if you listen this far you probably do, there is
a tool for dipping called the dipper DPR, which began
with the kickstarter in twenty eleven, and it's been hailed
(48:20):
as the latest and greatest in cookie spoons. It exists
that your oreo will be dipped evenly and you won't
accidentally drop it in your milk, because, again, as you
just said earlier, if your oreo is suspended in milk
for more than five seconds, it's worthless. Carry on.
Speaker 5 (48:37):
I'm just gonna rend battled that all of these institutions
are higher learning have put so much money and time
towards oreos. Instead of a desalemization or cancer cloud bursting
any of these things, you could actually save the world.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
While we're on the extremely academic studies of oreos, there
was a study published by researchers at Connecticut College in
twenty thirteen which states that oreos activate the same pleasure
center in the brains of lab rats that was activated
by cocaine and morphine. The high fat and high sugar
triggers the addiction hotspot in the brain, and one student
(49:14):
also observed that the rats would quote break the oreos
open and eat the middle first, one of the many
ways that I am like a rat. In a less
behavioral study that has to do with oreos, I would
like to discuss a little thing called the Oreo Run,
which we've been teasing this the whole episode. This was
(49:37):
a hazing ritual that took place at an Illinois high
school that made national headlines in October twenty eighteen, and,
according to a piece in the registrar Star, ten football
players were suspended for taking part in this event, the
Oreo Run, which entailed running across the school's football field
naked with an oreo wedged an oreo, shall we say,
(50:01):
up there there were cram and oreos up there, left
and right, left, right, and center, mostly center. The offending
parties were required to quote sit out three football games,
although given the crime, I'm guessing that they probably stood. No,
not even a titter.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
No. I just I don't know, man, Just this stuff
is soon really high school team. So I just that's
behaving at all, man, Like, Oh yeah, I mean I
used to put cigarette buds out of my arms for
like a party trick. But I didn't put stuff up
my ass, especially not food stuffs. You know, I was
told they were starving children across the world. Yeah, your
food is for your mouth. Your family sweated for that food.
(50:41):
You don't put it in your ass.
Speaker 1 (50:47):
It's a PSA, there's no trace of humor your voice
whatsoever right now? Genuine offense. I mean, I mean, God
bless you, all power to you. I'm yes, I agree
with you. I agree with everything he was saying. I
this is the hill that we're gonna tie on.
Speaker 2 (51:12):
Just bumps me out. I don't know. Weird. Find find
better to do with your life, people, Getness. Book of
World Records unsurprisingly has a lot of entries related to oreos.
On January thirtieth, twenty twenty, it closest the Western world
ever got to true happiness. Mondolaz employees from fifty five
locations representing thirty two countries around the globe tuned in
(51:35):
and set a new record for most dunked cookies simultaneously,
five sixty six employees dunking at the same time, nearly
two years earlier, in April twenty eighteen. In April twenty eighteen,
Mandolaz celebrated the opening of a plant in Bahrain with
the largest oreo ever. It was nearly one hundred and
(51:57):
sixty two pounds, and it was subsequently distributed among frant
employees and the local village. Wow, so sorry, we don't
I don't know I'm about to make it. I don't
know if they how well they paid them, they get
some Oreos.
Speaker 1 (52:11):
And lastly, per Guinness, oreos are officially the world's favorite cookie,
available in more than one hundred countries around the globe.
Approximately thirty four billion Oreo cookies are sold each year.
That's ninety two million cookies per day, with ten billion
of those cookies sold in the US annually, and an
(52:31):
estimated five hundred billion Oreo cookies have been sold since
they debuted in nineteen twelve. That is enough to wrap
around the Earth three hundred and eighty one times, or
reach the moon and back five times.
Speaker 2 (52:49):
Wow, this is where you're like, Yeah, send them to
the moon, but not backs join run up.
Speaker 1 (52:57):
I was gonna say, do something useful, use the ladder
of the moon if I doesn't need them.
Speaker 2 (53:03):
Well, folks, I did not foresee being driven to the
brink of madness and back by what you've convinced me
is a garbage cookie for idiots who knew it was
oreos that broke both of us. But looking back, the
scribes will write of this evening, women will sing songs
and lament, and our sons will mash their teeth and
(53:28):
look skyward at all the oreos and circle in the
globe and say, there's Papa. Thanks for listening. I'm Alex
Cycle and.
Speaker 1 (53:37):
I'm Jordan Runtag. And that's the way the cookie crumbled
us both. Oh too much information was the production of iHeartRadio.
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtogg.
The supervising producer is Mike Johns.
Speaker 2 (53:58):
The show was researched and written and by Jordan Rundgg
and Alex Heigel.
Speaker 1 (54:02):
With original music by Seth Applebomb and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review. For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating
facts about your favorite movies, TV shows, music and more.
We are your two doyens of drivel. I'm Alex Heigel and.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
I'm Jordan Runtag.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
And today, Jordan, we are venturing into a bold new
direction for TMI foodstuffs, specifically Oreos, which are celebrating their
one hundred and tenth anniversary this year. I have personally
always thought of Oreos as the season NBA metaphor, the
sixth man of the cookie world, the anchor. You know.
They're not chalky and disgusting like a Chips de Hoy.
(00:47):
They're wantonly sexual like a Nutter butter or snooty like
those high falutin Pepperidge Farm folks. They're the John Stockton
Utah jazz reference of the cookie aisle, all time assist leader,
just happy to be out there with the rest of
the guys, having a good time, playing their best and
helping the team. But Jordan, you you hit me with
a scorching hot take right before we started recording. Would
(01:08):
you like to repeat that for the fine folks out there.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Yeah, you know, I'm not a huge Areos fan, and
I do have strong thoughts on sweets. I don't really drink,
and you tend to find that people who don't drink
have an especially intense sweet tooth. So I can pratle
on about cookies like some people do about brandy or wine,
and I have to say, I don't know if it's
a case of familiarity breeds contempt, but I'm just not
(01:32):
a huge Oreos fan, and the flavors okay, but just
the experience of eating them to me is garbage. I mean,
let's pay say, the cookie itself or the wafer, if
you're being professional, is trash. It's stale, it's crummy, it's
bitter tasting, terrible mouthfeel, if we're getting really professional here.
(01:52):
I'm not a dipper, so maybe that's part of the problem.
Maybe if I dipped, it would be less like you know,
eating gravel. Feel like, no one actually likes the cookie
portion of Oreo. It's all about the cream feeling. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I mean it's the cream, and the cream is fine.
It's sweet, it's vaguely cream tasting, it's sugary, it's sweet.
(02:13):
I don't know. It's fine for me. Oreo is great
as a flavor of ice cream or milkshakes or the
cookies and cream candy bar. That's where the flavor profile
of oreo is great. But the actual experience of eating them, eh,
not for me. I could take them or leave them.
I'll take malamars or their fancy cousin pin wheels any day.
But how about you.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
You know, as someone who used to smoke a lot
of weed, I've had a lot of experience with oreos,
all kinds of oreos, the peanut butter. Also, you know,
as longtime listeners of the show will know, I grew
up in central Pennsylvania, so I have eaten my fair
share of chocolate covered and or deep fried oreos at
the state fairs.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
That I've never had. I've never actually had that, despite.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
My disgusting Just why it's awful? Just put yourself into
like a painful state of food coma and or diabetic shock. Yeah,
they're bad. I don't know why people do that to themselves. Well,
folks from the Vicious family feud at the heart of
the cookies invention to the insane process of making that
(03:11):
famous filling kosher certified in the late nineties to the
definitive scientific proof regarding the distribution of said filling to
the high school seniors who got in trouble for shoving
oreos up there. But that was Jordan's edition. Here's everything
you didn't know about oreos. The tangled web of oreos
(03:36):
actually begins in a bit of family slash corporate battles.
I did not know this. Around the turn of the
nineteenth century, biscuits were big business in America. Did you
know this?
Speaker 1 (03:47):
I did not know this.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
No.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
I know that they were basically trying to make biscuits
a thing over here in the way that they were
in the UK for tea time. Yes, I think that
was kind of the whole idea, was that they were
trying to create a market need where there was not
over here.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yes. And so in the late nineteenth century, two brothers,
Jacob and Joseph Leos, bought a controlling interest in the
Coral Cracker and Confectionery Company in Kansas City, Missouri. So
I can't believe you read that tech neither can I.
Particulars of this are not interesting. The point is that
Jacob decides that a bunch of Midwest bakeries can form
(04:25):
together and become a regional powerhouse to compete with those
snooty coastal elites Big Biscuit in New York. And So
in eighteen ninety he hires a lawyer named Adolphus Green
to oversee a merger that creates the American Biscuit and
Manufacturing Company, which becomes the second largest corporate bakery in America.
Jacob names himself president, appoints his brother Joseph to the
(04:47):
board of directors, and Adolphus to general counsel. Meanwhile, in
eighteen eighty nine, a guy named William H. Moore combines
a number of other bakeries to start the New York
Biscuit Company. More is more lest the archetype for what
would become the kind of nineteen eighties. Patrick Bateman, corporate
writer ac mergers and acquisition guys. His whole thing was
(05:08):
buying and consolidating companies. He lost one point one million
at one point in an attempt to buy the Carnegie
Steel Company, but subsequently tried again with the assistants of
JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller and succeeded creating US Steel,
which is one of the archetypal industrial mega corporations of
the twentieth century. So this is the guy who's behind
(05:29):
New York Biscuit.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
So moral the stories, you don't want to mess with
New York Biscuit.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
It sounds like no, no, no no. So American Biscuit,
New York Biscuit, and a third company called the United
States Bacon Company. These guys didn't have just terrible names,
battled each other for years in what broadsheet journalists actually
dubbed the Biscuit Wars at the time, and it got
so bad that Jacob had to take a step back
(05:53):
from American Biscuit for health reasons, and Joseph, now in control,
decides to make peace and merge with the other two
companies in eighteen ninety eight, a move Jacob vehemently protested
against from his sick bed.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Isn't this like the plot of The Godfather very much?
Speaker 2 (06:11):
So?
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Well, yeah, Sonny trying to make peace with the other families.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
While how they massacred my boy. Yeah uh, he said
that about Chipshy later. So the merger nevertheless goes through
and the three companies become the National Biscuit Company. Nah bisco,
I get it. There's no way to say that that
doesn't sound like a cult indoctrination. Forever forever, bah ram
(06:36):
you nah Bisco. Anyway, Joseph installs himself uh lawyer Adolphus
dream of.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Us nah Bisco and some other ex buddies of Jacob's,
and the company builds an enormous factory in what is
now the Chelsea Market and is well on its way
to national dominance.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, this building in Manhattan is absolutely massive. It's a
full city block, and that stretch of Ninth Avenue is
named Orio Way in its honor. And interesting point of fact,
the birthplace of the Oreo is now owned by Google.
They were just the building in twenty eighteen for two
point four billion.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
That's what That's a spicy cookie.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
That's a little block of meatpacking district Manhattan costs, I suppose.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Boy.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
So, Nabisco launches the wildly popular Barnums animal crackers in
nineteen three, although that is like most things this company does,
a ripoff of an existing British cookie. Fig Newton's also
come up around this time, and then in nineteen twelve
both Laura Dunes and Oreos so quite a batting average
(07:46):
out of the gate.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
But all those cookies are trash. I mean, especially Fignutons
are popular to eat at the beach because it already
tastes like you're eating sand, So now I can tell
when there's already sand in it. Yeah, I mean, Laura Dunes,
I can't believe those are still being made. I mean,
I don't think there's anybody under the age of seventy
who eats those. I hate all these cookies. Oreos gets
a pass just out of nostalgia alone. But yeah, interesting
(08:10):
fact about the sort of democratic way that the BISCO
goes about developing products. There was an article that appeared
in a nineteen thirty one issue of The New Yorker
written by E. B. White, the man who wrote Charlotte's Web,
and he describes his visit to the BISCO headquarters in
New York and the very kind of casual way that
employees could suggest new cookie ideas. Presumably there was like
(08:32):
a suggestion box, and then the bakers would make them
and then test these products out by basically just leaving
them out in the breakroom and watching to see how
many were eaten. And EB White writes in this piece,
a baker makes up a trial batch off the new
model and sends them upstairs, where they're placed in an
open rack by the water cooler. Employees may help themselves.
(08:52):
Everything is informal. There are no charts or tables. After
a few days of elapse, the heads of the department
simply meet and talk the thing over. As soon as
the cookie has passed its test, it gets a name.
We'll talk more about the Orio name later. That's how
Pablo Escobar ran his business too.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
But Jacob in the meantime heals up and from his deathbed,
rises with a vengeance and launches another new biscuit company
with another guy and calls it the Loose Wiles Biscuit Company.
They really got to work on these names. But with
the burning hatred and drive born of this Cane and
(09:30):
Able esque story, he brings the Loose Wiles Biscuit Company
up into the number two biscuit slot in the country
behind Nobisco, largely on the strength of one cookie, a
shortbread and cream sandwich with an ornate stamp design called Hydrus.
So we have to backtrack here because the quiet part
loud about Oreos is that they are a total ripoff
(09:51):
of Hydrugs. They came out in nineteen oh eight. NBISCO
files a trademark on Oreo in nineteen twelve, and it
is granted in nineteen thirteen. The first Oreo was sold
on March sixth, nineteen twelve, to a grosser in Hoboken,
New Jersey.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
They were sold by weight, originally at a cost of
two dollars and thirty five cents for nine and a
quarter pounds. The oreos cost a dollar eady five and
the tin they came in costs another fifty cents. The
original oreos were ever so slightly larger than the ones
we enjoyed today, and most importantly to me, they went
on sale just a month before the Titanic set sale
(10:27):
on her maiden voyage meeting. There's quite possibly remains of
early Oreo packaging on the ocean floor, although it departed
from the UK, so it doubtful got over there, but
people on board the Titanic may have been aware of oreos,
and that's good enough for me.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
They were eating hydrugs. You know.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
I just want to recap for a second, just because
this story, mostly due to the really terrible corporate names,
can be a little hard to follow, but it's amazing.
So two brothers start a cookie company, a cookie conglomerate.
The older brother works so hard that he then has
to take a step back. He's he's worked himself to
the bone. His younger brother makes peace with all the
(11:04):
competing other cookie companies and they merge against the older
brother's wishes. The older brother gets well, and he's so
angry that his younger brother has sold his own company
out from underneath him that he makes a competing company
to take them on. And this competing company has made
basically what's the prototype of Oreo, known as hydrox. I
(11:25):
just think that's amazing. Canaan Abele doesn't even begin to
cover it.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Here's what's funny about this. Hydrugs were far more successful
than oreos at the time. The real power behind the
throne at this point is the Jewish community. In nineteen
twenty four, Loose Wiles, the company behind hydrox, partnered with
the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America to create
the country's first kosher certification program, which, because hydroxes don't
(11:54):
use lard in their cream whereas oreos did, made hydroxes
enormously popular among the Jewish community, and this contributed to
their early market dominance. Nibisco attempted to hitch the Oreo
name to a bunch of their other more successful products
in displays and advertisements. There's a wonderful anecdote of this
copy from Serious Eats. One in nineteen fourteen, one stores
(12:18):
found itself with a surfeit of Oreos to the tune
of seven hundred tins, so they slashed the price and
literally berated their customers into trying to buy them. Yesterday,
we advertised those splendid oreos and they were a great bargain.
While we sold a few, they didn't move anything like
we expected. It's simply a case of you not knowing
(12:39):
what a fine biscuit delicacy they are. The customer, they're
literally the principal skinner meme. Is this cookie bad? No,
it's the customer who is wrong. I love that, But
you know they hydrouck Span. These guys, they bungled an
early lead man. It's rough, yeah, I mean for starters.
(13:01):
There's that truly horrendous name, Hydrox. It sounds terrible on
the page, It looks terrible. It looks like a Greek
monster with like six heads.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
It's awful. They were looking for a product name that
would evoke purity and goodness and good lord. They failed,
but they.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Maybe they succeeded too much and just evoked antiseptic sterility.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Right because I guess the name hydros came from the
atomic elements of water, hydrogen and oxygen high DROs. And
this was surprisingly given how ugly it sounds and how
it does not roll off the tongue in any way,
it was actually a really common name at the time.
There was the hydrox arated table water. There was hydrox
(13:49):
ice cream, Oh God, and hydrox ginger ale, and as
you mentioned, has a very antiseptic medical connotation and not
something that you want connected with confections. So perhaps because
of the whole Warring Brothers thing for fifty years, loose
Wiles really leaned on the whole copycat aspect of oreos.
They were really promoting hydrogs as the original beware of imitators.
(14:13):
There was one ad that featured a bear cub literally
crying over stolen crease, and their ad copy use words
like first and the finest, and the original and the
only and the classic and Warren consumers don't be fooled
by lookalikes.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
So much finger wagging, I love it or did, however,
I throat cookie World. Yeah, exactly, Jacob. The same year
Jacob dies, the older brother who quit his body not
even cold in the grave, Oreo sends out a series
of ads that would change the world. With no exaggeration.
I say this. They promote the classic Oreo twist method
(14:55):
of eating. It's on street cars. I believe it is
the big one saying everybody's doing the Oreo twist. Maybe
they didn't say that. I don't know, but that's where
the twist dates back to his nineteen twenty three coincidentally,
the same year the brother dies. I just this whole
thing is so Shakespearean.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
They did the Oreo twist on his grave.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Hey. By twenty fourteen, the Hydros name had fallen so
far that Keebler Kellogg's let the trademark lapse and it
was snapped up by Leaf Brands, who four years later
filed a complaint with the FTC against Oreos, alleging that
they hid Hydrox companies from customers on store shelves.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Oh, they hid Hydrox cookies from customers.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
That was the basis of the suit. I don't know
if it was actually settled, but man talk about with
my last breath. I stab at THEE from Hell's Dark Heart,
I stab at thee. They went. They just Hydrox versus Oreo.
Few to the century.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Wow, Yeah, I mean this was the Coke Pepsi of
the early twentieth century. We're going to take a quick break,
but we'll be right back with more, too much of
in just a moment.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Wow. With hydrux dead and buried, Oreos were free to blossom.
So shortan tell us about that.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Yes, the Oreo went my many variations of their famous
name over the years. When they were first introduced in
nineteen twelve, they were simply known as the Oreo biscuit,
and then by nineteen twenty one the cookie embraced its
shape and it was renamed the Oreo Sandwich, and in
nineteen thirty seven the name was changed again to the
distinctively high brow Oreo cream Sandwich. And I was saying
(16:40):
earlier at the top of the episode this was a
way to play off the British biscuits that were served
at tea time, and upon their initial launch, Oreos were
marketed as fairly high end. There's this amazing bit of
ad copy from I think around nineteen twelve, when they
were first unveiled and it describes the Oreo as quote
two beautifully embossed chalk flavored wafers with a rich cream filling,
(17:03):
which is over selling Oreos slightly. And the final official
name changed to Oreos came in nineteen seventy four when
the cookie became known as the Oreo Chocolate Sandwich Cookie,
or Oreo for short, and that's its official name to
this very day. Anyway, while we're on the topic of names,
it's still anybody's guess where the term Oreo came from,
(17:24):
but there are many theories. It could be derived from
the French word for gold, which was an early decorative
element for the Oreo packaging. But here's a grab bag
of other explanations that are out there. There's one theory
that says that the name stemmed from the hill shaped
test version that never made it to store shelves. I
guess the cream was piled up like a little mountain
(17:45):
and that inspired this cookie prototype to be named Oreo,
which is the Greek word from mountain. So that's one theory.
There's another theory that says that the word Oreo is
a combination of the ra from cream and sandwiching. It
just like the cookie between the two o's in chocolate.
Oh from chocolate, ree from cream, oh from chocolate. It's
(18:06):
a verbal visual pun. It's not I I you don't know,
I might.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
I just want to say I want you to do
you're doing like the drunk don draper like hand gesturing is.
It's just like the two o's and chocolate. It makes
makes story. Roger Sterling throws up in the lobby.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
I mean that's probably how this was name.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Right, They're all on cocaine. Just zut it up, like,
what should we call it?
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Areo h very number three? It stands for a rexigenic,
which is a medical term for substances that stimulate the appetite.
I would tend to want to dismiss this out of hand,
but considering hydrox.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
Was his competitive name, uh maybe, Well, way do you
get to the plant conspiracy theory, which is the next one?
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Yes, yes, this is a really good one. This is
your personal favorite and probably mine too. The decorations on
the top of hydrox the hydrox cookie at that point
included a mountain laurel. And guess what genus of plant
they belonged to? The mountain laurel. That's right, Oreo, Daphni, Oreo,
daphne uh. And this was bolstered by the fact that
(19:24):
someone in Nibisco clearly had a thing for plants. Of
the cookies that Nibisco offered in nineteen thirteen, there's the Avena,
the lotus, the helicon, the zephyrett, the zatona, the aola,
the ramona, and Oreo, and those are all Latin or
Botany names for different kinds of plants.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
I just love the idea that there's like one drunk
guy in the Nobisco copywriting thing. He's like, I'm gonna
name for plants no one will know. While we're on
the topic of that embossing that beautiful lorel wreath, it
kind of looks like a manhole cover at this point.
When they launched, Oreos used a much more organic plant
derived wreath for the emboss adding two pairs of turtle
(20:07):
doves in a nineteen twenty four redesign. The contemporary Oreo
stamp was introduced in nineteen fifty two and it has
remained unchanged ever since.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Every Oriole cookie contains ninety ridges, twelve flowers, twelve dashes,
and twelve dots. I feel like that's going to be
a great trivia question at some bar trivia somewhere.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
So remember that it's probably some kind of satanic numbering thing.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
We'll get to that.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Many people on the internet credit a man named William
Turnier who started as a mailboy at Nabisco with the
four leaf clover and serrated edge design. But Nabisco is
cagy about it. They will only confirm that a man
by that name worked for the company during that time
as a design engineer. In a very granular bit of
Internet dorkery, in the comments section of a twenty eleven
(20:55):
New York Times magazine article about the Oreo embossing, a
guy aiming to be William Turnier's son, Bill said that
the original blueprints for the cookie are in his possession
in North Carolina.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Did you go into the comment section of this twenty
eleven New York Times magazine article about the oreo and bossing,
I just protu scanning all the comment good.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Magician never reveals his secrets, Okay.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
But William Turnier's son, the aforementioned Bill, was interviewed by
Mental Floss, and he said that the design on oreos
quote goes back to monks who used it on the
bottom of manuscripts they copied in medieval times. It was
a sign of craft saying they did the best they could.
And there are some out there Internet sleuths, most likely
(21:41):
who have noted the similarities between the Oreo design and
the graphics used by the Freemasons and the Knights Templar,
thus linking the beloved cookie with the Crusades, which I
did not expect when we started this episode.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Bill also claimed that his dad modified the animal Cracker's box.
His contribution to that was adding the grass along the bottom,
designed the logo for Nutter Butters and Milk Bones, and
may have contributed to the design for the Rich Cracker.
William Senior left the East Coast and settled in Salt
Lake City, where his grave marker features an Oreo. Bizarrely enough,
(22:20):
given their seeming silence on crediting him, Bill claims that
Nabisco contacted his dad at one point to help confirm
aspects of the Oreo's design in order to build a
lawsuit against a company making a copycat cookie in Trinidad
and Tobago. Turn about his fair play Nabisco, But the
(22:41):
only thing in the official Craft Archives four turnire is
the receipt of a Suggestion Award in nineteen seventy two
for an idea that increased the production of nilla wafers
on company machinery by thirteen percent. So the company reaches
out to him. They're like, hey, do you have the
original blueprint for Oreos someone is trying to copy as
(23:03):
a Trinidad and Tobaggo. He's like, sure, I'll help you up,
and they still like disavow his credit for that. But yeah,
So between Oreos, milk bones, nut butters, animal crackers, ritz crackers,
and increasing the productivity of nilla wafers in nineteen seventy
two by whopping thirteen percent, William Turnier maybe the secret
MVP of the Oreos story. I just wanted to do.
(23:26):
I want to do my transition. Here is ding doom
ding ding ding ding dom ding ding all right on
my way? Dum. I would say that was terrible cut
that that might went over much better in my head.
The name of the heading is Ori on my Way,
like the song that's I'm rust send me on my Way.
(23:48):
That's that's not Rusted Root, is it? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (23:51):
I saw Rusted Root as a kid. No way, Yeah,
how'd that go for you's I'm sitting here talking to you.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Great, all right, that digression well and truly dead. Now
we arrive at the real heart of the matter.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Yes, the Oreo filling really the only good part of Oreos,
if we're all being honest with ourselves.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
This is the most heated you have been about anything
in the months we've been doing this podcast.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
I mean, I think there's there's no reason why Oreos
should be as big as they are. There's there's some
part in effectively every way, just get on with it.
But yes, the Oreo filling. The man credited with its
modern incarnation is named mister Sam Porcello. First of all,
did you know that there's a reason why cream in
(24:42):
Oreo is spelled cr e e because it contains no
dairy and therefore cannot be marketed using the spelling of cream,
which implies that cash is everywhere around me. Also, while
we're on the topic of cream, each original Oreo cookie
is twenty nine percent cream and seventy one percent cookie.
(25:05):
That is the official ratio, and Oreo bakeries make more
than one hundred and twenty three thousand tons of cream
to fill their cookies each year. That's incredible.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
I want you to Viking funeral me into the Oreo cream.
Event it just put me on a pire and sent
me on fire in the middle of one of those.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
The gentleman who's credited with creating the modern incarnation of
the Oreo cream mister Sam Porcello. He arrived at Nabisco
in nineteen fifty nine and worked there for thirty four years,
retiring in nineteen ninety three. Porcello's actual title was Principal Scientist,
but his son described him as one of the world's
(25:45):
foremost experts on coco, which eventually earned him the nickname
the autorific. Really, mister Oreos.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
This is where it gets really wild. Sarah Joyner is
this woman who uncovered this. It basically makes journalists look bad?
Is this whole story? So, but go ahead continue. I
just want to credit her because she really did the
leg work here.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Yes, ground zero for this whole theory that Porcello is
the guy who created the modern Oreo filling appears in
his twenty twelve obituary in the New York Daily News,
which was then picked up by the blogging community around
the world. Yes, this woman Sarah Joyner researching Pacello in
twenty twenty, reached out to Mondelez, which is the parent
(26:28):
company of Oreo, and they told her it would be
inaccurate to say that Sam Porcello invented the modern Oreo cream,
and a former Oreo rep she was exchanging emails with
said that she hadn't even heard of Porcello. So there's
some kind of erasure going on here at this time.
Orio really isn't like crediting the people who are behind.
(26:49):
You got the guy who invented the embossing, you get
the guy who invented the modern cream. Something's going on here,
But it turns out that the real story is, as ever,
very technical and boring. Porcello what's largest contribution to the
Orio cookie was in modifying the chemical composition of the
filling so that it was solid at room temperature but
melts ninety eight degrees as in when it hits your mouth.
(27:12):
But he shared those developments with three other food scientists,
and basically the credit he gets for being mister Oreo
pretty much comes down to the work of his own
family's hagiography since his death.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
This whole thing is so fascinating to me because if
you look up Oreo and you look up oreo filling.
It's like lodged in seo. But the original New York
Daily News link is dead and you can only find
it through the Internet news archives. So the only link
to this story is now in like it's like playing telephone.
It's only in blogs aggregating that story. So one is
(27:44):
on Time, the Time magazine website. And so this woman,
Sarah Joyner is researching this and it basically I think
what happened was this New York Daily News guy knew
or heard or got a tip about this guy dying
and just interviewed his family, and his family was like,
oh yeah, Dad was like, mister Orio, he invented the
(28:05):
oreo filling. But the more you dig into it, the
more it turns out that, like he just refined the
formula with a bunch of really boring food chemistry things
related to filling solubility, and he retired nineteen ninety three, which,
you know, we get into this next thing. They take
out lard in nineteen eighty four, and they take out
(28:27):
the vegetable oils they replaced the lard with in two
thousand and six, So by twenty twenty, his formula was
already two recipes out of date. And this woman, this
Sarah Joyner, is it's very sweet because she's like talking
to his son and she's like, oh yeah, like they
wouldn't have kept up with the formula changes. Like to them,
(28:48):
their dad is still the guy who invented the Oreo filling.
Like their dad is still mister Oreo. They didn't mean
to mislead anyone. It was just like lazy journalism. Nobody
bothered to fact check that. And it's just I don't know,
I find it very sweet in like this American life
sort of way. Like this family from Jersey is just
like their dad is mister Oreo to them, and they
(29:08):
told he always will be and he always will be.
And they told a single paper and the paper didn't
bother to fact check it, and it's become fact anyway.
I just want to tell everyone that I titled this
next section a Rabbi and a blowtorch walk into a
cookie factory. Remember how I said when hydrugs were hugely
popular with the Jewish community because they were kosher, so Oreo,
in their apparently never ending quest to bury all memory
(29:31):
of their predecessor and salt the Earth, decided to alter
their recipe and go kosher in nineteen ninety four, years
after Burchello retired, or the year after Brichella retired.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Also nineteen eighty four, at a time when hydrocks barely exist.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Yeah right, they're like someone was just it's like a
Monty Burns, Like one of the last surviving executives is
like crush jocks. This is so fascinating to me. This guy,
Joe Regenstein, professor of food science at Cornell and director
of the Cornell Kosher and Lull Food Initiative, called this
process probably the most expensive conversion of a company from
(30:06):
non kosher to kosher in in two thousand and eight interview.
And this apparently started when a number of ice cream
companies wanted to start using oreos in their products which
were kosher and couldn't because of the lar so. Nibisco
owned approximately one hundred baking ovens, each about three hundred
feet in length, and they all had to be converted
to kosher, the process that literally involved a rabbi crawling
(30:28):
through them with a blow torch. Because the ovens were
not kosher and baking is a dry, high heat process,
each one of these units had to be heated to
red hot temperatures. Regenstein said, you need to use a
blow torch to clean away the forbidden materials, so I
tell my therapist. Additionally, each oven contained a soft plastic
(30:49):
belt that cost upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars at a time, and each of these needed to
be replaced. This process took three and a half years,
wound up in nineteen ninety seven, after which I guess
they got Zelda Reubinstein from the Poltergeist movie to come
in and be like, this house is clean.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
This all brings us to a larger question, how do
you make an oreo? Well, obviously, the official ingredient list
is a closely guarded secret, and if we told you,
we'd have to kill you. But there are eleven major ingredients.
The hours follows sugar, unbleached flour, canola oil, high fructose
corn syrup, baking soda, corn start, soile, liketin, vanillin, and chocolate.
(31:32):
And in an article celebrating the seventy fifth birthday of
oreos from back in nineteen eighty six, this piece describes
five hundred degree gas ovens as long as football fields,
capable of cranking out two thousand cookies a minute, and
to quote the piece an oreo takes less than an
hour to make a half hour of mixing in bins
(31:52):
the size of Volkswagen beetles, and another twenty minutes on
the conveyor belts being pressed into shape and then bobbing
along from the third floor to the first, through ovens
and cooling tunnels, under the icing drum, and into machines
that stack and deal oreos like cards into cellophane packages.
But the five folks at Nabisco have a rigid approach
to quality control, and there are quote bins the size
(32:16):
of hot tubs filled with broken oreo wafers, and some
of these are ground up and reused in the batter,
while others are sold to ice cream companies to be
crumbled and mixed into their ice cream. But about five
percent of the cookies wind up b and R or
broken and rejected and thrown away, And says haven't we
(32:36):
all been b and R at one time or another?
Speaker 4 (32:41):
As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with
more too much information after these messages. Next step we
have a little section called Karma commer Comma, Karma, karma
cavig Nope.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
That was terrible. Don't I swear to God if you
don't cut that. They replaced the lard with partially hydrogenated
vegetable oil, and then they subsequently replace that in two
thousand and six with healthier and more expensive non hydrogenated
vegetable oil. Folks, if you're waiting for an explanation for
what those terms are, wait longer, because I don't have it.
This came after the FDA in two thousand and three
(33:23):
had announced new labeling requirements that required manufacturers to list
transfats on their packaging.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
Which are closely linked to heart disease. Especially They're fine
with doing it until they're being ordered to actually, well.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Yeah, they're doing it, yeah, every single company in the world.
So at some point this change in formula gave rise
to the claim that Oreos are vegan, which is like
one of the most commonly recited talking points about them.
But according to at least one check of their UK website,
there's just the possibility of cross contaminations with dairy products
at their facilities, and one extremely hard line vegan blog
(33:57):
that I found they contacted the OREO directly in twenty
ten and got the answer that, unfortunately for the militant
vegans among us. Some of the enzymes used to condition
dough in processed goods are animal derived, so you've got
the blood of microscopic organisms on your hands. And some
(34:19):
sugar suppliers use the animal derived natural charcoal bone jar
in their sugar cane refining process. So depending on your
tolerance for animal products, and we are literally talking parts
per million. But if you're nothing, no shame. If you're
one of those people who's like, I want everything, I
need to be completely free of the blood of animals,
I don't think Oreos your ticket there. Speaking of enormous
(34:43):
multinational corporations, there is an entertaining story of some corporate
subterfuge that entangled Oreo recently. Recently ish in twenty fourteen,
two California men were sentenced to prison time after stealing
the formula for a chemical whitening agent called typ titanium
dioxide from American chemical company du Pont. So this titanium
(35:05):
oxide dioxide from DuPont specifically is like the purest, like
most sought after white pigment in the world, and it's
jealously guarded, and so these guys broke in there and
sold the formula to Pengang Group, a Chinese company that
had been unsuccessfully trying to buy this formula for over
twenty million dollars. The conviction of these men in the
(35:26):
court documents subsequently leaked to the fact that Oreo used
this chemical to whiten their filling and had hit it
from the ingredients list, which caused some concern because recent
studies have flagged it as a carcinogen. So all is
not as pure white as the driven filling.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
And speaking of oreos and countries with communist ties with
whom we have a troubled relationship, did you know that
oreos apparently weren't officially available in Russia until twenty fifteen?
Did you?
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Did you?
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Did you.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Look at me when I'm talking to you?
Speaker 1 (36:11):
China got them a little earlier in nineteen ninety six,
but they tanked when they were first released, to the
point that they actually considered withdrawing Oreos from Chinese stores
all together, but instead in the Bisco parent company at
the time, Kraft decided to take a very ironically democratic
approach and ask the Chinese consumers what they didn't like
(36:33):
about Oreos so they could adapt them for that market,
And after receiving feedback, they invented a new kind of
Oreo to appeal to China, and it's more like a wafer.
It's four layers of a crispy cookie with a vanilla
or chocolate cream center in the middle, not unlike a pirouette.
You know, those kind of long cigar shaped things. Yeah,
(36:53):
it's like that. It's very, very, very different from the
Oreo we know in love. By two thousand and six,
this Oreo wafer had become the best selling biscuit in China,
just after a decade after they were considering withdrawing from
the market altogether. They were now number one and Kraft
expanded the production of this adapted cookie into other parts
of Asia, Australia and even Canada. And they were all
(37:16):
sorts of interesting international flavors of oreos. There is blueberry
ice cream and coconut delight in Indonesia, Argentina has a
duo flavor Dulce de leche and banana, and China has
green tea flavored and mango. And in August of twenty eighteen,
they released two savory flavored Oreo fillings, hot chicken wing
(37:38):
and wasabi, which Jesus Christ. This leads us to our
patented section on gross Oreo flavors.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
All right, so the original failure was a lemon I
think they made lemon moringe. They call it lemon morine
Oreo in nineteen twenties, which discontinued.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
I think that was released alongside like the chocolate Oreo
when they first dropped in nineteen twelve.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Satists Golden Oreos are vanilla cookies with the same vanilla
cream as the original Oreos. Golden chocolate cream oreos, known
as the quote uh oh Oreo until two thousand and seven,
are the reverse of the original cookie vanilla cookies chocolate
cream frosting. But here's what you folks have been waiting for.
A semi complete list of other Oreo flavors, running the
(38:22):
gamut from mildly offbeat to fully disgusting. There's the famous
birthday cake oreos good, Swedish fish, bad cream, sickle, banana
split cream, really bad, Neapolitan.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
I don't even know what triple double means. I guess
that's triple stuff.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Yeah, yeah, good, good best so far. Candy corn No,
I don't like candy corn as a standalone thing. Oreo
as a subpar cookie coconut fudge. Sure, aren't those just
hop lungs or dosy does or whatever from the growth
cut cookies? Oh no, those are samoas and those are
way better. But that's fine.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Gingerbread, sure, candy cane, white fudge covered Okay, yeah, I
don't even know how you do this. Cookies and cream oreos.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
I don't either, because that's cookies and cream is Oreo flavored,
so it's an Oreo flavored oreo.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
I know a cursive oreo. No, I've gone across side
root for your float. No watermelon, terrible, marshmallow crisp.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
I don't understand that.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
No caramel, apple, no lime aide. God, there's definitely Yeah,
I mean pumpkin spice. You have to That was good?
Speaker 1 (39:30):
That was good? Yeah, okay, it goes very good.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Cookie dough, Yeah, it's fine. Red velvet cotton candy.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Sure, s'mores cinnamon bone, which is not on here was
the best.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Oh have you had the churro shaped oreos? No, I
think they're just those. The flavors are the same, they're
just shaped like churros.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
Oh I have seen those? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, No, I
haven't had those yet. Actually, I haven't had most of these.
I'm just judging from the name. If you missed out
on the chance to see these these limited edition Oreo
flavors on store shelves, you're in luck. There was an
exhibit at the Museum of Failure in Los Angeles which
(40:14):
has most of these flavors, although the exhibit might have
closed by now. It's also Coca Cola flavored Oreo, which
I don't remember seeing that a synergy thing. Yeah, somebody
got paid.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Drunk John Draper right.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
And hit the table. And you know, I've often wondered
in those twilight hours when I can't sleep and I'm
pondering all the things that are going wrong in my life,
and to try to make it so that I can't
actually have a few moments of blissful slumber before I
have to wake up and face another day of compiling
these insanely researched episodes. I think about, why, why with
(40:54):
the good folks at Nibisco flood the market with these
truly grotesque flavors Oreos more than fifty at this point,
more often than not disgusting. Well, apparently there's a method
to their madness. GQ interviewed a Coronell University behavioral economist
named David just to explain this phenomenon. The key is
(41:15):
that Nabisco's not trying to introduce the flavors for long
term consumption. He says, you build in this idea of
really tacky flavors, and that sort of builds this relationship
to the consumer who likes to sort of check out
these kitchy Oreos, he explained, and as an added bonus,
many younger consumers basically give the company free pr by
(41:36):
posting these new flavor reviews on social media. So David
just describes this approach by Oreos as quote, building a
personality behind its brand.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
I love them. Do you buy that? Sounds like corporate
portions to me?
Speaker 1 (41:49):
I mean I buy it. I think it's a cheap
and easy ole, relatively cheap and easy way of market
testing new flavors that they can maybe enter into the mainstream.
And also, yeah, that's actually I thought I hell of
a lot more about Oreos when they introduced some bizarre
new flavor that more often than not I was curious
about trying than I would have It was just the
same old thing that had been around for one hundred
(42:11):
and ten years.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
So yeah, maybe, yeah, true all right, KGI good for them. Uh. Then,
of course Oreos oreo O's cereal launched in teen ninety seven,
discontinued in two thousand and seven everywhere other than South Korea,
and relaunched ten years later. And speaking of twenty seventeen,
Virginia based the Veil Brewing Company released a version of
(42:35):
their chocolate milk stout called a horn Swoggler that was
infused with actual Oreo cookies. I haven't tried it, don't
know how I feel about it, don't care. Uh, I'm
not going to Virginia for chocolate stuff, even if it
does have I can't believe it's taken us as long
to get to double stuff. Yeah, but like many things
(42:57):
at the heart of America, it is a lot featuring
not actually double but closer to one point eight six
times as much stuff. Those date back to nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Apparently it was like a high school class that actually
crunched the numbers on that and figured out that it
wasn't actually double stuffed. It was like a big story.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
A couple of years ago we mentioned the triple stuff,
but that was not the biggest Oreo nineteen eighty four
Oreo introduced the Big Stuff varietal, which is about ten
times the size of regular Oreo Wow. Sold individually. Each
Big Stuff contained two hundred and fifty calories, which that's
actually which I thought thirteen grams of fat had tracks.
(43:41):
I saw an anecdote earlier that it took someone like
twenty minutes to eat one at a sustainable pace.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
Well, yeah, because it's like it's probably like saltines your
mouth from a cookie, it's gets so dry. It's probably
hard to.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
Eat three inches in diameter. That can possibly be right?
Speaker 1 (43:56):
How thick is it?
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Oh? Yeah, I guess that's true.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
Okay, So let's say six on top, six on the bottom,
or five on top. Okay, I can see that how
that would work. The ad for the Big Stuff is
on YouTube and it's pretty great, and naturally the jingle
is a riff on Gen Nights Mister Big Stuff, because
of course, and hell Oreo could afford it.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Well.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
We mentioned earlier at the top of the episode that
the classic Oreo twist behavior has been part of the
brand's identity from very early on, back in the twenties.
But what does your preference for Oreo consumption patterns say
about you? Well, according to one widely disseminated study, and
we use that term loosely done by craft. In two
(44:41):
thousand and four, they studied the habits of two thousand
oreo eaters. Dunkers are supposed to be quote energetic, adventurous,
and social, while twisters are quote sensitive, emotional, artistic, and trendy.
And finally, biers are quote easygoing, self confident and optimistic.
(45:04):
That this is probably a bad time to ask which
one are you?
Speaker 4 (45:12):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (45:14):
Is there a pithy phrase for when you just reach
your hand into a bag of loose, crumbled ones and
just kind of shove a fist full in your mouth.
Your bag is balanced on your stomach and you're watching
Northern Exposure on a laptop instead of going on to
work because you can't raise your head that day? Is
(45:35):
there a word for that?
Speaker 1 (45:36):
That's the depression technique of eating oreos. I mean, I
don't understand the when you twist it apart. Are you
supposed to lick the center because you can't lick the
cream because it's solid?
Speaker 2 (45:49):
Well, you know, we have mister sam Porcello to think
for that, right, But if you hold your tongue, yeah,
like an art show exactly, you just hold it up
to your tongue until the body temperature heats it up
in a slide it off that I have no idea
what I'm talking about. I think honestly, like in all
of my lockdown Bodega snack runs, I think they got
(46:11):
nutter butters like everything. I'm not at like a do
both of us not like cornes? Weird thing to come
up an hour eight into this podcast.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
They're fine.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
No.
Speaker 1 (46:24):
To me, it's like the sprite of cookies. It's like
that's what you have at the party when there's nothing
else there, and.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
You'll have it, but like, just feel something anything.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the love that people have for oreos,
science has gotten involved more than once. In the late nineties,
Len Fisher, physics professor at the University of Bristol, claimed
decades old mathematical formula describing capillary action, which is the
phenomenon that describes how liquids cling to dry surfaces, could
predict the perfect dunk time for a cookie, and using
(46:57):
a formula from American scientist E. W. You wash burn
and testing with ink blots first, he described the perfect
amount of time for dipping quote regular British biscuits at
three and a half to five seconds. Crucially, though, he
did not test oreos, and so in twenty sixteen, members
(47:17):
of the Utah State University's Splash Lab stepped up to
the plate and corrected this grievous error in a test
of Oreos chips, ahoy nut or butters, and gram crackers.
They dipped the cookies halfway in two percent milk for
half a second to seven seconds, and after dunking, the
team weighed the treats and measured how much milk had
(47:39):
been absorbed. The results, I know you're dying to know.
Oreos absorbed fifty percent of their potential liquid weight in
just one second. After two seconds they absorbed eighty percent,
and the number flat line briefly for a second, and
after the fourth second the cookie maxed out. It absorbed
all its possible milk. So if you were a dunk
(48:00):
your oreos for more than four seconds, you're wasting your
precious time on this planet. So do with that what
you will. But for those taking their dipping seriously, which
if you listen this far you probably do, there is
a tool for dipping called the dipper DPR, which began
with the kickstarter in twenty eleven, and it's been hailed
(48:20):
as the latest and greatest in cookie spoons. It exists
that your oreo will be dipped evenly and you won't
accidentally drop it in your milk, because, again, as you
just said earlier, if your oreo is suspended in milk
for more than five seconds, it's worthless. Carry on.
Speaker 5 (48:37):
I'm just gonna rend battled that all of these institutions
are higher learning have put so much money and time
towards oreos. Instead of a desalemization or cancer cloud bursting
any of these things, you could actually save the world.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
While we're on the extremely academic studies of oreos, there
was a study published by researchers at Connecticut College in
twenty thirteen which states that oreos activate the same pleasure
center in the brains of lab rats that was activated
by cocaine and morphine. The high fat and high sugar
triggers the addiction hotspot in the brain, and one student
(49:14):
also observed that the rats would quote break the oreos
open and eat the middle first, one of the many
ways that I am like a rat. In a less
behavioral study that has to do with oreos, I would
like to discuss a little thing called the Oreo Run,
which we've been teasing this the whole episode. This was
(49:37):
a hazing ritual that took place at an Illinois high
school that made national headlines in October twenty eighteen, and,
according to a piece in the registrar Star, ten football
players were suspended for taking part in this event, the
Oreo Run, which entailed running across the school's football field
naked with an oreo wedged an oreo, shall we say,
(50:01):
up there there were cram and oreos up there, left
and right, left, right, and center, mostly center. The offending
parties were required to quote sit out three football games,
although given the crime, I'm guessing that they probably stood. No,
not even a titter.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
No. I just I don't know, man, Just this stuff
is soon really high school team. So I just that's
behaving at all, man, Like, Oh yeah, I mean I
used to put cigarette buds out of my arms for
like a party trick. But I didn't put stuff up
my ass, especially not food stuffs. You know, I was
told they were starving children across the world. Yeah, your
food is for your mouth. Your family sweated for that food.
(50:41):
You don't put it in your ass.
Speaker 1 (50:47):
It's a PSA, there's no trace of humor your voice
whatsoever right now? Genuine offense. I mean, I mean, God
bless you, all power to you. I'm yes, I agree
with you. I agree with everything he was saying. I
this is the hill that we're gonna tie on.
Speaker 2 (51:12):
Just bumps me out. I don't know. Weird. Find find
better to do with your life, people, Getness. Book of
World Records unsurprisingly has a lot of entries related to oreos.
On January thirtieth, twenty twenty, it closest the Western world
ever got to true happiness. Mondolaz employees from fifty five
locations representing thirty two countries around the globe tuned in
(51:35):
and set a new record for most dunked cookies simultaneously,
five sixty six employees dunking at the same time, nearly
two years earlier, in April twenty eighteen. In April twenty eighteen,
Mandolaz celebrated the opening of a plant in Bahrain with
the largest oreo ever. It was nearly one hundred and
(51:57):
sixty two pounds, and it was subsequently distributed among frant
employees and the local village. Wow, so sorry, we don't
I don't know I'm about to make it. I don't
know if they how well they paid them, they get
some Oreos.
Speaker 1 (52:11):
And lastly, per Guinness, oreos are officially the world's favorite cookie,
available in more than one hundred countries around the globe.
Approximately thirty four billion Oreo cookies are sold each year.
That's ninety two million cookies per day, with ten billion
of those cookies sold in the US annually, and an
(52:31):
estimated five hundred billion Oreo cookies have been sold since
they debuted in nineteen twelve. That is enough to wrap
around the Earth three hundred and eighty one times, or
reach the moon and back five times.
Speaker 2 (52:49):
Wow, this is where you're like, Yeah, send them to
the moon, but not backs join run up.
Speaker 1 (52:57):
I was gonna say, do something useful, use the ladder
of the moon if I doesn't need them.
Speaker 2 (53:03):
Well, folks, I did not foresee being driven to the
brink of madness and back by what you've convinced me
is a garbage cookie for idiots who knew it was
oreos that broke both of us. But looking back, the
scribes will write of this evening, women will sing songs
and lament, and our sons will mash their teeth and
(53:28):
look skyward at all the oreos and circle in the
globe and say, there's Papa. Thanks for listening. I'm Alex
Cycle and.
Speaker 1 (53:37):
I'm Jordan Runtag. And that's the way the cookie crumbled
us both. Oh too much information was the production of iHeartRadio.
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtogg.
The supervising producer is Mike Johns.
Speaker 2 (53:58):
The show was researched and written and by Jordan Rundgg
and Alex Heigel.
Speaker 1 (54:02):
With original music by Seth Applebomb and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review. For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Host
Jordan Runtagh
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