A Gustav 30 in 30, #16: Jolly Kranchers

[Gustav 6,322]

 

A moment greatly anticipated by all, and the only time I have ever shared a physical object with a VHLer. Way more Discord sleuthing than I'd like to admit went into trying to track down the day the transaction was completed, and I'm pretty sure it's been wiped from the memory of the league server. But anyone who was there to see it can verify that it happened.

 

 

It was early 2019, and I was finishing up my first year of college. I'd learned over the course of that past year that it isn't all too uncommon for people in my line of work to end up in various places in the food industry, and that's an industry that had its hands full as Heinz was getting busy rolling out a new product to the Western world.

 

First introduced in 2018 to the Middle East, Mayochup is exactly what it sounds like when you think about it--mayonnaise and ketchup mixed together into this weird, off-pink gunk that looked pretty weird and sounded a lot weirder. And because we're not going to rest until we've tried the latest shiny new product, a social media push brought the 'chup outside the region the next year. I remember exactly how this went down at the grocery store where I worked--we were sent "distros" of Mayochup (short for "distributions," this means that the company bought a bunch of it and sent it to us without our ordering it individually, making it our problem). These were in the form of "shippers" (large cardboard pop-up displays) that we had to set up all over the place. The sides of each even contained the question of "WHY IS EVERYONE TALKING ABOUT #MAYOCHUP?" which I found a little bit stupid. 

 

The Mayochup craze wasn't really much of one, honestly. There are certain items that you would not believe sell as quickly as they do unless you've seen it. When it goes on sale, you'd better do whatever you can to keep up with the flow of canned soup, Gatorade, cereal, Cheez-Its, and (maybe even more than all of those) both mayo and ketchup. It's a constant pain to deal with, especially in the summer, and it's really only beat by sales of water when it's 90 degrees out and the mad rush on the baking aisle around holiday season. Long story short, mayo and ketchup separately did great--mayo and ketchup together did not (even when Hellman's very briefly tried jumping on board by sticking ketchup packets to their mayo jars. If you don't remember this, I think it was a thing on exactly one of our shipments). We had an extra stock of Mayochup in the back room for a while after it stopped being so exciting and new, and though it earned a permanent spot on the shelf, it wasn't something we were dying to promote again.

 

That is, of course, until summer hit. With summer comes grilling, and with grilling come some interesting changes in the layout of your store. You have to spend lots of time filling up charcoal--which gets your hands dirty and spreads coal dust all over everything in the back room because the bags tear open super easily. You have to fill up bottled water multiple times a day, sometimes doing it and then getting yelled at for it being empty half an hour later. And you put up displays of things like...condiments.

 

Also, companies start getting great ideas about what to do over the summer. Heinz had introduced Mayochup at a bit of a weird time, when we weren't trying super hard to push things you'd normally find on a barbecue display (including hot dog and hamburger buns, another thing I forgot to mention that becomes a giant pain in the ass. At my store, this was a store manager responsibility, but more often than not it was pawned off on us). But by the time summer came up, they had a.) clearly been wanting to make a big marketing splash, and b.) just given in to social media pressure to mix some stuff together, and even though that particular instance had just done OK (I guess Mayochup hadn't completely bombed), I'm sure the general concept still seemed appealing.

 

Which led to me opening up our store's first shipment of this stuff and having to set up its display:

 

 

I'm intrigued by the challenges that had to have been faced by the food stylists over at Heinz. Each of these was a weird, off-white version of its non-white component. None of it looked good, and lots of it sounded awful to me. Sales of the three new flavors that summer almost did completely bomb--our display quickly became a "please take this off our hands" type of deal, and only Mayochup continued to exist at our store past that summer. But I digress.

 

At some point over that summer, the Heinz Saucy Sauce line (as it was seriously known) became a topic of conversation and a running joke in VHL Discord thanks to my bringing up its existence. Most people I talked to agreed that it really didn't sound all that great, although some people found some of them an interesting concept. One of those people was @Beaviss, who took a hard disagreement on my negative impression of one of them in particular: Kranch.

 

Ketchup and ranch didn't seem like a very good combo to me, and Kranch didn't look very good to me either. But me having work stories soon started to go hand in hand in chat with me encountering any given Saucy Sauce, which then was just associated with Kranch in particular. We talked about bathing in Kranch, drinking Kranch, directly injecting Kranch, all sorts of things. A few of us developed mock unhealthy obsessions with it. Sometimes I'd just talk about how much I loved Kranch for about 10 minutes straight with one person or another.

 

It also wasn't sold in Canada at the time. I'm not sure if that's changed, but it's very relevant that this was true in 2019.

 

I'd made a mostly-joking promise to Beav that I'd send him Kranch if he wanted. The trouble was that he actually did--and he wasn't letting me forget it. Kranch had been on the shelves for about a year at that point. My store had long stopped carrying it, and I'd never tried it nor known anyone who had. It would have escaped all of our imaginations if it weren't just so persistent.

 

Which is exactly what led to me going to Target one day, finding it there, and buying it. I reached out to Beav, got a work address, and got to work trying to figure out how to ship something across an international border (something I haven't done since). Eventually, I gave up on that and ended up walking into the post office. I remember weird looks from people in line, and I remember the guy laughing at me when I walked up to the counter, set it down, and said "I know this sounds really weird, but I'd like to know how I can ship this to Canada."

 

I got everything I needed there, filled out the form, and spent about $25 (that's about $7200 Canadian) to cover shipping costs. Off the Kranch went--and a couple weeks later, I had photographic proof that it had made it all the way across the continent. Allegedly, Beav found Kranch pretty solid with fish and chips. Occasionally after the fact, he'd send me an update of something else he'd tried it on. It was fun to keep up with and only made the joke stronger over that dreaded COVID summer where I essentially traveled back and forth between work and the VHL.

 

Flash forward a couple years, and I'd moved out and found myself buying my own groceries. I took it upon myself at one point to get myself some Kranch and give it a try:

 

 

Kranch is OK. Maybe it could go well with some fish and chips, though I've never tried it. 

 

Usually I like to close these things by thinking about what they meant to me, but this was mostly just meant to be a story of something I did and found funny at a particularly bad point of my life. If I had to find some meaning, I'd describe it in a couple different ways. Connecting with someone half-in-person by sending a real object was actually a nice thing, and I think that overall this is a nice reminder to go and find what's interesting and funny in things that aren't necessarily meant to be. As dumb as it sounds, I'm glad that I got to experience Kranch with the VHL, and I hope you find the story as fun as I do.

 

 

Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience:

 

#1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name

#2: Can't We All Just Get Along?

#3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway?

#4: The House That I Built

#5: Can We Fix It?

#6: American Beauty

#7: The Kids Are Alright

#8: Dogs In A Pile

#9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake

#10: This Old House

#11: Go Directly to Jail

#12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball

#13: How I Messed Up Davos

#14: Ello Gov'nor

#15: Weewoo

[Thunder 1,061]

Not an early morning read!!  Stomach is not ready for mayochup!!   How come this stuff never got in your comments in job pay?

[Gaikoku-hito 1,990]

I won`t lie the first thing I did was look at the date since this just doesn`t look real and doesn`t sound real. After that the next thing I did was check Amazon to see if it was real and if I could get some!! LOL!! I guess I could just try mixing them together myself but at what ratio? Either way interesting this product even exists and if I ever find some I might give a try!!

 

I can see why this was a topic...