Wednesday, December 7, 2022

An Open Letter to Best Foods

Dear Best Foods,

I really want to thank you for providing me with a brand new life experience recently. I’m fifty now, so my new life experiences these days mostly revolve around a different joint becoming painful, pulling a new muscle getting up out of a low chair, or messages from my doctor about my colon.

But you provided me with a new and far less uncomfortable life experience the other day.

You mailed me a condiment.

I’m just writing to let you know that’s a really weird thing to do.

I received a plain white padded envelope in the mail, with absolutely no markings on it except my address and the return address, which was listed as “SOPOST, 14 Henderson Drive, West Caldwell, NJ.”

What is SOPOST? You guys are lucky I opened it. If it wasn’t Christmastime, I probably would have tossed it, but you never know what my wife has purchased this time of year. I sure as heck wasn’t going to be the one responsible for Grandma’s stocking coming up short on Christmas morning, so I looked inside.

Imagine my surprise to find one single fast-food-size packet of your new Spicy Mayonnaise Dressing hot-glued to a postcard with a picture of a chicken sandwich on it.

Look, I’m not going to lie to you – the chicken sandwich and fries pictured on the card look amazing. And from what I can tell from the photo, you seem to think your new Spicy Mayonnaise Dressing goes well as a sandwich spread and as a fry dipping sauce.

That may very well be true, but how am I supposed to tell? You sent me exactly 0.47 fluid ounces of your new sauce. I’m a full-grown man with three large and still growing teenage boys. None of us has ever used just one fast-food-size packet of any condiment on anything we’ve ever eaten.

I mean, I put four packets of hot sauce on each one of my Taco Bell crunchy tacos. My boys ask for an entire separate bag filled with Chick-fil-A sauce cups to go with their chicken and fries. Those things hold way more than 0.47 ounces, and they go through them all.

This is America, Best Foods, as you can tell by both the To: and From: addresses on your weird plain white padded envelope. We love our sauces here in America, and you should know that better than anyone. How are you expecting me to get excited about your amazing new spicy mayo when you send me basically one drop of it? I’m going to run out before I’m halfway through my first bite of chicken.

If you want to market your new sauce with free samples to a house full of American men, you’d best be sending us the 11.5-ounce bottle sitting next to the chicken sandwich in the picture. I mean, have you ever even seen a teenager eat? Suffice it to say, keep your hands and feet away from their mouths at all times. At the rate the food enters their bodies, I’m amazed they taste any of it. You have to have a lot of sauce on there to get any kind of reaction out of them.

And speaking of my boys and your marketing department – if you really want to sell this stuff, don’t send me a single packet all the way across the country in an unmarked envelope like a bunch of weirdos. Get with the times. Pay an influencer on YouTube or TikTok to rave about how amazing your sauce is. That’s how you market to kids, and they’re the ones inhaling all the sauces around here anyway.

You are welcome for the condiment-ary advice,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2022 Marc Schmatjen

 

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