“I like Oreo.” (Descends into madness.)
Stop what you're doing.
Because the Oreo is not the original cookie sandwich.
“A lot can happen with Oreo cream sandwich.” Hold on to your mind.
It's about to get blown.
“Cookie or creme?
CREME. CREME.”
The Oreo didn't come out until around 1912.
Hydrox came out around 1908.
Oreo is the rip off of the original cookie sandwich, and yet it rightfully
claims to be “Milk's favorite cookie.” “Baked by Nabisco.” How did this happen?
What is going on here?
This is a story about cracker technology and the law and this wall
and the secret clue that is hidden on the front of every Oreo.
This is why Oreo won.
You know, the funny thing is, I don't even like cookies.
This is purely for research.
But before we start on our cookie journey, I want to get some qualifiers
out of the way.
Did Oreo win because it tastes that much better than all the competition
or did it win because Hydrox is a terrible chemical style name?
First, let's do the taste test.
“0-R-E-O.” I want to say first,
we have no idea if this is what the cookies tasted like in the 1910s.
Sure, we can consult ingredient lists, but just look at this picture
of an old Hydrox.
That picture, it looks nothing like the Hydrox of today.
So we can only assume so much based on taste.
That said, let's, let's get going here.
Hydrox
The take home point for me is that the Oreo is sweeter
and there is a little less creme to the cookie, at least
in the traditional version that I've bought today.
There's like more creme in the Hydrox, but it's less sweet.
I love to be a hipster,
especially when it comes to cookies, but I like the Oreos better.
Okay, I'm just going to do one more.
I don't want to eat another one right away.
I'm going to suggest that the idea that Oreo ripped off Hydrox
is sort of a mistake.
So-called Bouquet sandwiches like these
were an established thing in the 1890s.
In the 1900s.
And even the company that we called Nabisco
sold other products with vanilla flavored filling chocolate cookies.
Now, let's talk about the name.
This is going to be an uphill battle. I get it.
That's reasonable.
Hydrox is a bad name.
However, I would argue that it wasn't always a bad name.
In the 1900s, there were ice cream
brands and Ginger Ales that were also named Hydrox.
And the Oreo name is just kind of random.
There are rumors that it refers to the Greek name for Mountain,
but it's not really that great.
Or to the point,
is it really great enough to justify that huge gap in sales volume?
People will then tell you that the marketing for Oreo was better.
But what did that mean in 1900?
Look at these two ads.
They look similar enough to me.
That is why you need the context of all cracker history.
And that's why I left the office earlier today to go
somewhere else.
Now, listen, you might not be familiar with Cracker Barrel.
It is this folksy, retro style restaurant
that has pretty good food and pretty good prices.
But they are named after a “cracker barrel.” I had no idea what that was
before this video, but it turns out that it's really important to why Oreo won.
The first thing you need to know is that just about a decade before Oreo
was born, cookies, crackers, biscuits, wherever you want to call them...they
were all disgusting.
The breakthrough for me was when I read a 500 page book about crackers
called “Out of the Cracker Barrel.”
I went up to a few barrels at Cracker Barrel, but I didn't find anything.
These crackers, they understandably got kind of gross being in a barrel.
They turned stale, they crumbled, they got wet, and there were pests
that often just crawled in, kind of made a little house at the bottom.
Basically, the restaurant Cracker Barrel is like if you named
your restaurant the “Rat Feces Diner”.
But in the late 1800s, things started to change for the better.
All the consolidation that happened in businesses like rail
and oil, well, big business came to bakeries, too.
For better or for worse.
Nabisco, the
future makers of Oreo, became the giant in this industry.
Their name changed a lot.
But I'll just say Nabisco for the rest of the video.
This composite drawing shows all the factories in one picture
and the mastermind, a lawyer named Adolphus Green, was a hard nosed genius.
He had secured this distribution advantage, but he wanted technology too.
Nabisco ended up owning the rights to special packaging called the In-er-seal.
This is the patent.
It seems like a simple idea to us today, but it totally changed crackers.
They could ship cookies and crackers in cartons and protect them with wax paper.
Everything stayed fresh, as they said
“when all biscuit crackers and wafers were alike identifying
marks would have been useless.” But In-er-seal suddenly changed that.
There was a difference between different types of crackers because only
certain crackers were wrapped in fresh preserving wax paper and a nice carton.
They told people to ask for it in stores.
If that logo looks familiar to you, you are not wrong.
Oreos used to look like this, but today they have Nabisco’s logo on them
and it's printed on every single Oreo.
I'll just say eat this one since I got it out. Mmm.
Now look at this 1930s Oreo ad, which still sold on the same attributes.
The surrogate shopper says, “I stick to National Biscuit Company cookies.
I know what's in them and they're always fresh.” Technology gave Nabisco
a huge leg up on a platform where every product could play.
This unified packaging also gave them a big opportunity
in selling their various baked goods.
They could blast ads for a national product on a viable packaged platform.
And that is where I made my second stop today.
This is a
real you Uneeda biscuit ad and you can find these
all over the United States.
It has all the trademarks you would expect.
There's a big In-er-seal logo.
The National Biscuit Company name a sign that says it's only sold in packages.
Uneeda biscuit is a name that might not be familiar to you,
but you should know it because it might be the most important cracker in history.
In the early 1900s, Uneedaa biscuit.
I will not explain the joke here.
Uneeda biscuit was the first mass market cracker.
Imagine the perfect soda cracker.
I hate tech analogies, but this was like Nabisco’s iPod.
Suddenly, because cookies were packaged, you could really sell them.
And with this consolidated bakery system, you could sell them all over the country.
It was a threshold moment for the consumer packaged good.
They marketed Uneeda a biscuit on countless walls just like this one.
And they made sure to put that inner seal logo on it.
The trend continued in ads like this one.
See these small cartons and large boxes, including Oreo,
were all marketed as Uneeda In-er-seal products.
They were building a brand.
They made the Uneeda biscuit spokesboy a national icon
and made sure that iIn-er-seal came with it.
And this dog.
Well, I don't really know anything about the dog.
but look at this guy.
Outdoor advertisers were happy to leap into this industry as well.
You can see it in this old industry publication: “The Open Cracker
Barrel is gone, advertising goods of known quality.”
So when the Oreo launched, it didn't matter that Hydrox had come before it.
It was part of a platform of Nabisco products.
And “the final achievement in the making of biscuit.” Oreo was along for the ride.
Consumers had gone from random stuff in a Cracker Barrel to a full
brand portfolio.
Call me biased, but
I'm going to going to stay Team Oreo.
Sorry.
Finally, where was Hydrox in all of this?
They were made by Sunshine Bakers.
Big Bakery, for sure.
They ended up putting their
marketing muscle behind the fact that their bakeries had a lot of windows.
Now they did advertise, too,
and they also tried to rip off National Biscuit Company.
Look at the Tacoma Biscuit in this window.
Competition was fierce.
And in this 1920 Fortune magazine article, it was clear that people thought
that Oreo was an imitation of Hydrox,
but it was much, much more complicated than that.
Oreo and Nabisco had a brand with a unified trademark.
In ads, Nabisco said “the red seal will identify
the real Oreo.” You can see this same story with Crax.
What are Crax? You don't know about Crax.
Crax Crackers came before Ritz crackers and they got straight up Hydroxed.
Now you can see that Crax promoted their packaging, too.
But then in the 1920s and 1930s, the Nabisco advantage was bigger than just
the In-er-seal innovation.
So why care that Oreo beat Hydrox?
Well, it is relevant today.
I mean,
other people can make good chocolate cookie sandwiches,
but all those crazy new Oreo flavors, they've got a brand to build off of.
They've got distribution.
It is not just luck, but a strategy.
Because success?
It is rarely just a matter of taste.
“Creme.” (Said with the power of a thousand creme demons.) All right.
Thanks for watching this video about why Oreo won.
I hope that you found it satisfying if you're a Hydrox fan, boy or girl,
I apologize for hurting your feelings.
It's how I feel.
Feel free to tell me I'm wrong in the comments.
Or if you have other theories about why Oreo won, though I'm pretty convinced.
If you haven't been here before, this is a personal channel
where I make videos about personal stuff, history stuff,
all sorts of topics like that.
I've got sources in the description.
I also have a link to the Patreon reaction video to this one,
which is where I provide all sorts of commentary and extra facts
that I couldn't include in the video proper.
So maybe you'll join me over there on Patreon.
I also post updates during the week.
And yeah, it's been fun to kind of see a community grow there
and some of the people have seen me develop an obsession
with Hydrox over the past week, so hopefully I'll see you there.
But regardless, I hope to see you in the next video.
Until then,
I need to...I need to detox on the sugar.
Okay. Bye.