11 May 2015

stuck like ketchup in a packet

ketchup packets. the return on investment is crazy tiny. they're nearly impossible to open and when you finally get them open, there is like a drop of ketchup in there. why are they so insufferably suffer-inducing??

the heinz company (soon to become the kraft-heinz company) sells upwards of 11 billion ketchup packets per year. that's billion. with a "b". impressive? pffth. arguably, this multitudinous sales number would be fractionalized if one didn't require 12 to 15 of the loki-forsaken packets to produce a single blop of ketchup.

a man named benjamin eisenstadt ran a diner across from the navy yard in brooklyn during WWII, but after the war, business declined and ol' ben decided to open a tea packaging company. seems reasonable, right? pffth. who am i kidding? it's completely unreasonable. makes no sense whatsoever. but that's what ol' ben decided to do. unfortunately, ol' ben didn't count on the competition. i guess this was before the age of the pro forma. at any rate, ben couldn't cut it as a tea bagger.


so now he's distraught. he's poured all is money into the machinery. what's he gonna do? ahhhhh! ben's wife betty had the winning idea - package sugar. (she'd cleaned up the messy sugar bowls in the aforementioned diner.) stellar idea and certain road to fame and fortune, had ol' ben remembered to patent the process.

oops.

ben did go on and package other foods, namely soy and duck sauce. obvs ol' ben knew folks in the chinese food biz... anyhoo - packages! tiny packages of food! i think you see where i am going here.

benjamin eisenstadt is the father of the ketchup packet.

how does knowing this get us any closer to knowing why the packets are so freaking annoying? was ol' ben annoying? could be, could be.

thing is - we do know the packets' origins, being produced on tea-bagging machinery, so we do know why those packets were originally so small. why are they still that way? i guess they just got stuck...
stuck like ketchup in a packet.

yup.

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