Column: Not all foods would work with a Christmas color scheme

Published 12:00 am Monday, December 16, 2002

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and the aisles in the supermarket are no exception. Have you ever noticed just how many food products are available in a holiday version?

Coca-Cola has produced Santa cans for years. Cap’n Crunch has Christmas Crunch (a yuletide version of Crunch Berries), and Big Chocolate cranks out Snickers, Hershey and Butterfinger candy bars shaped like pine trees, snowmen and bells. This is a smart marketing move on their part. I’m sure it generates holiday spending that otherwise might not occur.

It wouldn’t work for all food products to adopt this principle, however. There’s probably a very good reason why Miracle Whip doesn’t produce a red and green swirled holiday version of their salad dressing. I could be wrong on this one. Heinz cranked out several wacky colors of their ketchup, and as far as I know, they didn’t suffer from a lack of sales.

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Christmas versions of breakfast cereals have been around for a while, but only the cold kind. Now, because I’m not a fan of oatmeal in any form other than a cookie, I might be biased, but I have a tough time imagining a demand for red or green peppermint candy cane flavored Cream of Wheat.

The soup aisle, too, should probably avoid doing this. Unless I was colorblind, there is no way I could eat ravioli or Spaghettios in green sauce, even with tree-shaped meatballs. Macaroni and green cheese wouldn’t sit too well, either. If anyone wants soup in Christmas colors, there’s always split pea and tomato. Hopefully in separate bowls.

Dairy products, with the exception of egg nog, should avoid this practice, too. Milk drinkers might be somewhat hesitant to chug a glass of sickly green colored opaque liquid, and using red would make the milk look to much like Pepto-Bismol. Colored butter would also have little appeal.

Next we come to the bakery. Christmas cookies and other goodies are always welcome, but that’s where I draw the line. Red and green dinner rolls wouldn’t have any place on my table. That goes for bread, too. Then again, I’d rather eat those than some of the wacky breads already available in the bakery at Christmas time, such as that horrid, gag-reflex inducing julekage.

Chocolate covered anything is big during the holidays, especially chocolate covered cherries, pretzels and jellied orange slices. Also popular are those Hillshire Farms meat and cheese gift things that you buy for people that you don’t know well enough to know what they like, but do know well enough to justify a gift exchange. I hope these two worlds never collide. Summer sausage or pepperjack cheese dipped in chocolate almond bark does not sound very tasty to me.

This is kind of from the other end of the spectrum, but Christmas product related, so I included it here. Candy canes have been around for years, and we’re all familiar with their peppermint flavor. Times have changed, though, and now a few new fruit flavors have popped up, such as blueberry and kiwi strawberry. Nothing wrong with that. I just hope they don’t go too far into the produce aisle and start cranking out pomegranate or rhubarb flavored candy canes. Even worse would be celery, carrot or onion flavors.

Having a Christmas tie-in, in some cases, is all fine and dandy, but it seems some products are better off left as is.

Dustin Petersen is an Albert Lea resident. His column appears Mondays.