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)

nosh nook #118 - wednesday, august 26, 2009

miami's natural choice vending stocks healthy options in snack machines (link)
08.25.09 - miami new times - by jacob katel

i remember the days when vending machines were vending machines. you'd pop a few quarters into the machine, pair up a number & a letter & a bag of entirely unhealthy hohos or a can of tooth-decaying coca cola would drop down, ready to fill you with all the sugars & salts & syrups that your little heart desired. that's a time whose time has surely passed. if you're a high school student, there's a good chance that your school has already banned sweets & sodas from the vending machines. good luck trying to get your lunchtime fix of take 5 candy bars, sally.

now a company out of the miami area, natural choice vending, is taking the "healthy vending machine" concept to the next level. the miami new times, village voice media's south florida arm, gave jennie & rebecca albano, the masterminds behind natural choice vending, a call to get the inside scoop on how they're bringing health to the vending machine. at the moment, they only have three clients--the miami herald, ransom everglades high school (in coconut  grove) & world fuel services (in doral)--but they're just starting out. schools are an obvious outlet for expansion, but as far as expanding into schools goes, they plan on "focusing on private schools because public school is sort of a political bidding process, and (they're) just a small company." it's probably for the best. you have a better chance of getting private school students to eat veggie booty anyhow. public school students just prefer plain ol human booty.

pricewise, almost all the healthy snacks are $1.00, so they're comparable to the prices in most vending machines. jennie & rebecca aren't concerned with making money though. for them "it's not about money making, it's about let's give people an option." ...as long as that option is a healhy option, that is. don't get me wrong. it's not that i don't enjoy healthy snacks. it's just that i'm a cold-hearted snake who likes to make fun of people, especially when it comes to the recent crusade for healthy foods. i know. i'll burn in "hell" for it one day.

nosh nook #36 - monday, may 4, 2009

machine dispenses snacks while bbc talks doom and gloom about the economy (link)
05.03.09 - slipperybrick.com - by conner flynn

how would you like it if every time you got bad news, you got a snack as well? swine flu has shuttered your country? here's a bag of doritos for you. your fiance is a murderer? crack open a cool, crisp nestea. eighty civilians died today in a bombing in your village market? have a clark bar. it's pretty obvious that if we had vending machines that took the edge off bad news with a free snack, life would be a lot sweeter. at the plymouth college of art, in the u.k., such a vending machine exists. in this case, it's just an art project, but that's technically still reality.

as flynn notes in the article, bbc headlines come up on a monitor attached to the vending machine. every time a headline speaks to bad economic news, the vending machine dispenses a packet of walker's crisps, which you can take. glasgow based ellie harrison, the current artist in residence at plymouth college of art, developed the piece, which speaks to both generosity & "a time in the future when our access to food may literally be determined by wider political or environmental events. we may not be able to access what we want, when we want, at the touch of a button."

vending machine from ellie harrison on vimeo.

i like it.  good concept.  good snacks.  good art.