pop quiz theorists let me know your answer down in the comments how do you eat your oreo cookie do you a just eat it like a normal cookie what am i even talking about here do you be dunk it in milk and nibble away the soggy portion of the cookie do you see twist the cookie apart and eat it in pieces or d black out and wake up 30 minutes later half naked on the floor covered in crumbs with two full sleeves of oreos held unaccounted for just figured i'd ask you know for a friend me i'm uh i'm probably more of a c type of guy definitely definitely see [Music] hello internet welcome to food theory the show that's here to fill your brain with the most stuff people often ask me matpat why do you want to ruin my childhood year after year channel after channel episode after episode you go out of your way to undermine everything i love about disney and nintendo and now even kool-aid why well here's the truth friends come closer and i'll tell ya closer closer i'm not trying theorists i'm just a simple youtuber who happens to follow the facts wherever they lead take today's episode as an example i set out to make a pleasant little video about oreo cookies i really did i stumbled across a fun fact about how oreos spent a lot of money to make their cookies kosher back in the 90s harmless right i love oreos i love our food channel i love the fact that our food channel allows me to buy things like oreos that i can write off on my taxes and heck it sounded like an interesting topic so naturally i looked into why oreo would spend tens of millions of dollars on a recipe tweet when they were already the best selling cookie in the world and what i found is that it wasn't just a business decision about dollars and cents it was a personal vendetta and from there i just descended down into grocery store conspiracies and big cookie trying to smash little cookie into crumbles and a cover-up that's been decades in the making theorists it turns out going kosher was oreo's master stroke in a century-old sandwich cookie feud that's right i said sandwich cookie feud and i'm not so sure that oreo's on the right side of this one either cause that sweet little fun fact about oreos being kosher is in fact sandwiched between two dark sinister secrets so settle in theorists because while oreo's cookies may be kosher their alleged business practices haven't always been it's time for oreos to get dunked on dunked on as in dunked in the milk but also dunked on in anyway it all begins a long time ago so here's how this whole cookie feud began back in the 1890s brothers jacob and joseph loose started a bakery together in kansas city missouri jacob fell ill and went to europe to recover while he was way joseph used his seat on the company's board to take the company in a new direction and form the national biscuit company today known as nabisco jacob the sick brother was not happy about this decision eventually recovered from his illness and returned to the states he decided to get back into the cookie game but not with nabisco instead jacob started the loose wiles biscuit company with a new business partner quickly building it up to be the second largest bakery in the u. s behind you guessed it nabisco a large part of that success came in 1908 when the loose wilds biscuit company released the hydrox sandwich cookie a revolutionary dessert with two chocolate cookies and a cream filling four years later nabisco would release the oreo and um well it was a ripoff of the hydrox and a shameless one at that like there is no beating around the bush here my friends i mean just look at these two cookies side by side the circular shape the flavorings the colors the filling the biscuits and that's not even mentioning the design the name in the center the ridged edges the intricate floral inspired pattern it's safe to say that the oreo was made to look like the hydrox heck even the name oreo is a jab at hydrox it's a reference to the oreo daphne a genus of flowering mountain laurels just like the pattern on the hydrox cookie and this theorists is the first dark secret at play here the uncomfortable truth about america's favorite cookie day the world's favorite cookie is that it's an outright rip-off of the original hydrox now there's a fine line between unethical business and good business say what you will about oreo's origins but the fact of the matter is that it was followed up by decades and decades of good business decisions on nabisco's part and a lot of questionable ones on hydrox's end today the original sandwich cookie has faded into obscurity while the imitator cookie is a beloved icon the world over and that's all thanks to marketing first we have gotta talk about the names here i mean why on earth would someone name their cookie the hydrox like you might as well have named the thing hydrogen peroxide at that point elon musk is master of strange names and even he wouldn't name his kid hydrox but what's crazier than the name hydrox is that loose wiles actually wanted for a chemical sounding name they named it hydrox to recall the purity of water as in the chemical compound of hydrogen and oxygen see hydrox hit the scene at a time when other food companies were literally putting stuff like chalk sawdust and even sulfuric acid into food products so purity was a really appealing marketing claim and for a time it worked people loved their hydrox and oreos operated at a loss for years perhaps oreos would have gone the way of hydrox but then came the advertisements you see hydrox was annoyed that oreo copied their idea and understandably so but loose while made the mistake of letting that pettiness creep into their ads for decades the hydrox was presented to consumers not as a delightful delicious snack but as the first sandwich cookie but who cares about being the first it's about what you deliver to the person buying you and while hydrox was busy stamping their feet and whining about copycats oreos just emphasized the fact that they were fun to eat it's fun living on a ranch but who's having the most fun he's riding a pony but they're eating oreo cookies delicious oreo cream sandwich not to pile on here but compare that outrageously wholesome slice of americana to this hydrox commercial from the 80s you like a creamy center here's a creamy center thick delicious creamy creamy but you gotta remember my name hydrox hydrox don't forget eyebrows yeah that one um that one makes me really want to eat your cookie so to recap what we just witnessed that was a television commercial in which a hydrox cookie reveals himself to the audience then gets arrested for it anyway hindsight is 20 20. and from where i'm sitting it's pretty clear that oreo had the stronger marketing strategy for like the entire 20th century and the kicker is that nabisco actually started charging more for oreos in order to make hydrox seem like the crummier cookie anyway long story short here oreo managed to turn its lagging sales around in the mid-1950s overtaking hydrox to be the best-selling sandwich cookie and they've never looked back since but despite being bested by oreo at every turn hydrox always had one ace in the hole its recipe was kosher whereas oreos was not the loose wiles company did make one smart move early in its founding in 1924 they partnered with the union of orthodox jewish congregations of america to create the first kosher certification agency in the united states hydrox was one of first get approved this move earned hydrox a lasting commitment in the jewish community even to this very day now let's take a moment to clarify what being kosher actually means if you're jewish you could probably skip ahead a minute or two or you know keep watching to make sure that the jewish researchers that i had working on this episode aren't speaking out of turn if not well shalom internet basically the jewish religion calls for its followers to follow kashruth which is a set of dietary laws that describe what jews can and can't eat and how they can eat it in chapter 11 of leviticus in the torah god gave moses and his brother aaron rules for the children of israel there are rules for everything that roams the earth swims in the seas and flies in the skies but the only rule that applies here is this quote whatsoever it's parteth the hoof and is holy cloven-footed and cheweth the cud among the beasts that may ye eat pigs have cloven hooves but they do not chew their cud therefore they are not kosher that is why oreos were historically considered treyf or non-kosher the original recipe called for lard to give that white cream center its tasty buttery texture lard is rendered from pig fat that's right what's that creamy stuff in the middle of an oreo cookie well amongst other things pig fat anyway lard worked fine in the white creamy stuff for decades until the public started to get concerned about saturated fats at which point oreo adjusted its recipe to use hydrogenated vegetable oil instead at that point oreo found themselves with a cookie that contained fully kosher ingredients but they didn't have kosher certification because the kitchen and utensils used to prepare kosher food have to be cleansed as well and for a company of their size obtaining that certification would be no small or inexpensive undertaking as it meant nabisco would need to get their factories kosherized which by the way is apparently a real word i looked it up nabisco knew the price tag of kosherization would be massive but it would be worth the cost right who wouldn't want more customers in the jewish community well it's not that clear cut of a story the market for kosher cookies is pretty teeny less than two percent of the us's population is jewish and a minority of those only about 20 percent actually keep kosher worldwide there are about 14 million jewish people around the world in 2010 representing 0.
2 percent of the global population and of those only 50 stay kosher so at most you're talking about maybe 7 million new customers for a cookie that is already dominantly the number one cookie in the world and yet in 1994 oreo pulled the trigger and began what's likely the most expensive corporate kosherization of all time why'd they do it well it's not as though oreo made their true intentions public knowledge the company claims that it was all about ice cream a lot of kosher certified ice cream companies apparently wanted to partner with oreo but couldn't because the cookie brand wasn't certified but really the choice to go kosher came with an added benefit for oreo and this benefit was both business and personal nature the kosher niche market was pretty much the only thing that their old rival hydrox had going for him at that point by going kosher oreo realized that they might finally be able to put their nemesis hydrox out of business for good and that's exactly what happened four years and tens of millions of dollars later oreo finally got their kosher certification and by 2003 kellogg's who owned hydrox stopped making the cookies all together hydrox the original sandwich cookie had finally been done in by the copycat that is until a few years ago when hydrox came back in 2015 a small candy company that thrives on nostalgic called leaf brands decided to bring back the original sandwich cookie a return that would go figure also come packaged with an 800 million dollar complaint filed against oreo's parent company mandalas international and this theorists is the other dark secret that i teased earlier in the video oreo after all these years is still allegedly playing dirty to kill off hydrox only this time the battle's happening in the grocery store cookie aisle i mean it sounds crazy but since 2015 leaf brands have found example after example of hydrox being hidden behind oreo packages being turned sideways on the shelf being shoved to the back of the shelves moved to the top shelves pretty much anywhere except for where the consumer could easily see them why would that have anything to do with mandalas international or oreo brand because mandalas is literally in charge of product placement on cookie shelves that's right these days big companies like mandalas international who spend a lot of money on in-store marketing can actually become what's known as category captains for their aisles this means that they decide how the shelves are laid out not just for themselves but also strangely enough for their competitors which is just like the most monopolistic thing out there it is so insane it'd be like letting babe ruth umpire a yankees game it's like letting a defendant judge his own trial it's like letting food theory choose your suggested video feed okay maybe that one isn't so bad furthermore mandalas has the resources to do direct store distribution meaning they send their own people to physically place the products on shelves rather than letting the store handle it so when a certain product is regularly found hidden or out of place or in an inconvenient position there's a good chance either the category captain or the person stocking the shelves is to blame and in hydrox's case mandalas is often both basically these days the grocery store is cut throat and there's no place for the little guy so does this mean that hydrox is doomed yet again has it slipped to the bottom of the milk glass and gotten soggy and inedible not so fast if hydrox wants to be the little brand that could ironically enough they just need to go back to their roots just like the cookie this story is coming full circle remember how i said in the early 20th century consumers were really concerned about food purity because the literal poisons that were being stuffed into the food that they were purchasing and that's why hydrox got their name well today we seem to be going through that exact same process asking ourselves what we're eating and if it's doing more harm than it's worth and won't you know it but leaf brands is producing the reborn hydrox using the original loose wiles recipe which calls for all non-gmo ingredients including real cane sugar and real vanilla realistically hydrox is gonna get way more bang for their buck advertising as a healthier alternative to oreo rather than sticking with the same griping and borderline flashing that they'd been doing for decades and best of all we know that that strategy can work in the face of juggernauts like oreo nabisco and mandalas let me introduce you to tate's bake shop a small brand of chocolate chip cookie that in less than 20 years broke through the crowded cookie market to give mandalas a company that made billions in the cookie aisle a run for their money the reason tate's bake shop was so successful was that it was a premium product made with the same ingredients that you or i would use to make cookies chocolate chips unbleached flour butter eggs vanilla you know normal sounding stuff not chemical names and it worked people were snatching them up causing an upheaval in the chocolate chip cookie market strong enough to get mandalas to purchase the brand for 500 million dollars in 2017. hydrox has the same advantage so use it why not try something different and if you don't mind might i suggest starting with the name but hey speaking of fresh healthy ingredients maybe you should try something different today like hellofresh the sponsor of today's episode theorists do you want 12 free meals delivered right to your door with zero delivery charge no nothing just free food immediately on your doorstep well then listen up go to hellofresh. com by clicking the code down in the description and use the code food theory 12 to get 12 free meals including free shipping hear that right 12 meals all delivered right to your door for free like if that's not a deal that's worth giving a try i don't know what is hellofresh sends recipes and meal kits straight to your 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