snackdown! - 2.5.10

with the super bowl only two days away, the snack world's been positively abuzz with article after article about which snacks you can use to spice up your super bowl party. basically, all the articles do is give some "unique" take on the same snacks people eat every year during the game--nachos, wings, pizza, etc. use turkey wings instead of chicken wings & smother them with dr pepper bbq sauce! make a pizza that's half colts-inspired & half saints-inspired! YAWN. i tell you, if i see another article featuring some cutesy super bowl recipe, i'm taking a hostage.

• wall street's taken quite a beating over the last few years, but that doesn't mean that the folks working there don't still know how to have a good time. last friday, a group of investment bankers at calyon decided to GET WILD by holding a chicken mcnugget eating challenge in which one dude attempted to eat sixty chicken mcnuggets in twenty minutes. since wall street peeps love playing with money, they started taking bets on his success & all told, there was $10K floating around. in the end, he finished all sixty nuggets in only fourteen minutes. his prize...$500, an amount that should cover about a fifth of his impending angioplasty. (animal ny)


• in kingsport, tennessee, two dudes had a serious craving for a bounty of snack cakes but no desire to pay for them. lucky for them, there were snack cake-filled trucks parked outside a kingsport bakery, so they made their way into one of the trucks to start filling up. unfortunately, an employee heard them & called the cops. when the cops arrived, they followed footprints in the snow leading up to one of the trucks & found both "$300 worth of hostess snacks - cupcakes, minimuffins, streusel cakes, twinkies, zingers and 100 calorie cakes - piled up beside it" & the two dudes hiding out underneath it. the best part about the article was the readers' comments, which was kicked off with the cautionary "if they aren't careful, their snack cake addiction can sno-ball into more serious problems." ha! (kingsport times-news)


• new yorkers love eating, but this week researchers at the tulane university school of public health revealed that even though we love eating, we're less tempted to snack. as gothamist points out, "we're at less of a risk of coming into contact with snacks at the checkout than anywhere else in the country." i'm not sure how that translates to being "less tempted to snack," since you can be tempted to snack at a lot of other places other than the checkout counter. anyway, there's at least one takeaway from the article--the obesity rate in manhattan is half of what it is in the rest of the country. take that, you mississippi fatties. (gothamist)


• last year during the super bowl, denny's ran ads promoting a free original grand slam breakfast & the promo was so popular that their website had some serious issues. this year, they're bringing back the free breakfast offer & promoting it with a series of ads featuring a "spokesman warning chickens everywhere to 'get out of town' because 'it's going to be a tough week for egg layers.'" in addition to the free breakfast, the first 500k people who sign up for denny's rewards program get a voucher for a free burger & fries and as part of a limited-time offer you'll be able to get refills on pancakes & fries. refills on pancakes? that rules! the downside: you have to go to denny's. (promo magazine)


• the vending machine industry is huge ($30 billion a year) but with the recession & less workers around to spend money on snacks, they have to come up with ways to keep business booming. on wednesday, the national automated merchandising association (NAMA) descended on washington to lobby capitol hill & they brought along a number of touch screen vending machines with them, including "the diji-touch, an interactive touch-screen machine with an interface modeled after the iphone." apparently that's the new recipe for improving the customer experience--make your product more like the iphone. (washington post)