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Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts about your favorite movies, TV shows, music and more.

We are your two doyens of drivel.

I'm Alex Heigel and.

I'm Jordan Runtag.

And today, Jordan, we are venturing into a bold new direction for TMI foodstuffs, specifically Oreos, which are celebrating their one hundred and tenth anniversary this year.

I have personally always thought of Oreos as the season NBA metaphor, the sixth man of the cookie world, the anchor.

You know.

They're not chalky and disgusting like a Chips de Hoy.

They're wantonly sexual like a Nutter butter or snooty like those high falutin Pepperidge Farm folks.

They're the John Stockton Utah jazz reference of the cookie aisle, all time assist leader, just happy to be out there with the rest of the guys, having a good time, playing their best and helping the team.

But Jordan, you you hit me with a scorching hot take right before we started recording.

Would you like to repeat that for the fine folks out there.

Yeah, you know, I'm not a huge Areos fan, and I do have strong thoughts on sweets.

I don't really drink, and you tend to find that people who don't drink have an especially intense sweet tooth.

So I can pratle on about cookies like some people do about brandy or wine, and I have to say, I don't know if it's a case of familiarity breeds contempt, but I'm just not a huge Oreos fan, and the flavors okay, but just the experience of eating them to me is garbage.

I mean, let's pay say, the cookie itself or the wafer, if you're being professional, is trash.

It's stale, it's crummy, it's bitter tasting, terrible mouthfeel, if we're getting really professional here.

I'm not a dipper, so maybe that's part of the problem.

Maybe if I dipped, it would be less like you know, eating gravel.

Feel like, no one actually likes the cookie portion of Oreo.

It's all about the cream feeling.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean it's the cream, and the cream is fine.

It's sweet, it's vaguely cream tasting, it's sugary, it's sweet.

I don't know.

It's fine for me.

Oreo is great as a flavor of ice cream or milkshakes or the cookies and cream candy bar.

That's where the flavor profile of oreo is great.

But the actual experience of eating them, eh, not for me.

I could take them or leave them.

I'll take malamars or their fancy cousin pin wheels any day.

But how about you.

You know, as someone who used to smoke a lot of weed, I've had a lot of experience with oreos, all kinds of oreos, the peanut butter.

Also, you know, as longtime listeners of the show will know, I grew up in central Pennsylvania, so I have eaten my fair share of chocolate covered and or deep fried oreos at the state fairs.

That I've never had.

I've never actually had that, despite.

My disgusting Just why it's awful?

Just put yourself into like a painful state of food coma and or diabetic shock.

Yeah, they're bad.

I don't know why people do that to themselves.

Well, folks from the Vicious family feud at the heart of the cookies invention to the insane process of making that famous filling kosher certified in the late nineties to the definitive scientific proof regarding the distribution of said filling to the high school seniors who got in trouble for shoving oreos up there.

But that was Jordan's edition.

Here's everything you didn't know about oreos.

The tangled web of oreos actually begins in a bit of family slash corporate battles.

I did not know this.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, biscuits were big business in America.

Did you know this?

I did not know this.

No.

I know that they were basically trying to make biscuits a thing over here in the way that they were in the UK for tea time.

Yes, I think that was kind of the whole idea, was that they were trying to create a market need where there was not over here.

Yes.

And so in the late nineteenth century, two brothers, Jacob and Joseph Leos, bought a controlling interest in the Coral Cracker and Confectionery Company in Kansas City, Missouri.

So I can't believe you read that tech neither can I.

Particulars of this are not interesting.

The point is that Jacob decides that a bunch of Midwest bakeries can form together and become a regional powerhouse to compete with those snooty coastal elites Big Biscuit in New York.

And So in eighteen ninety he hires a lawyer named Adolphus Green to oversee a merger that creates the American Biscuit and Manufacturing Company, which becomes the second largest corporate bakery in America.

Jacob names himself president, appoints his brother Joseph to the board of directors, and Adolphus to general counsel.

Meanwhile, in eighteen eighty nine, a guy named William H.

Moore combines a number of other bakeries to start the New York Biscuit Company.

More is more lest the archetype for what would become the kind of nineteen eighties.

Patrick Bateman, corporate writer ac mergers and acquisition guys.

His whole thing was buying and consolidating companies.

He lost one point one million at one point in an attempt to buy the Carnegie Steel Company, but subsequently tried again with the assistants of JP Morgan and John D.

Rockefeller and succeeded creating US Steel, which is one of the archetypal industrial mega corporations of the twentieth century.

So this is the guy who's behind New York Biscuit.

So moral the stories, you don't want to mess with New York Biscuit.

It sounds like no, no, no no.

So American Biscuit, New York Biscuit, and a third company called the United States Bacon Company.

These guys didn't have just terrible names, battled each other for years in what broadsheet journalists actually dubbed the Biscuit Wars at the time, and it got so bad that Jacob had to take a step back from American Biscuit for health reasons, and Joseph, now in control, decides to make peace and merge with the other two companies in eighteen ninety eight, a move Jacob vehemently protested against from his sick bed.

Isn't this like the plot of The Godfather very much?

So?

Well, yeah, Sonny trying to make peace with the other families.

While how they massacred my boy.

Yeah uh, he said that about Chipshy later.

So the merger nevertheless goes through and the three companies become the National Biscuit Company.

Nah bisco, I get it.

There's no way to say that that doesn't sound like a cult indoctrination.

Forever forever, bah ram you nah Bisco.

Anyway, Joseph installs himself uh lawyer Adolphus dream of.

Us nah Bisco and some other ex buddies of Jacob's, and the company builds an enormous factory in what is now the Chelsea Market and is well on its way to national dominance.

Yeah, this building in Manhattan is absolutely massive.

It's a full city block, and that stretch of Ninth Avenue is named Orio Way in its honor.

And interesting point of fact, the birthplace of the Oreo is now owned by Google.

They were just the building in twenty eighteen for two point four billion.

That's what That's a spicy cookie.

That's a little block of meatpacking district Manhattan costs, I suppose.

Boy.

So, Nabisco launches the wildly popular Barnums animal crackers in nineteen three, although that is like most things this company does, a ripoff of an existing British cookie.

Fig Newton's also come up around this time, and then in nineteen twelve both Laura Dunes and Oreos so quite a batting average out of the gate.

But all those cookies are trash.

I mean, especially Fignutons are popular to eat at the beach because it already tastes like you're eating sand, So now I can tell when there's already sand in it.

Yeah, I mean, Laura Dunes, I can't believe those are still being made.

I mean, I don't think there's anybody under the age of seventy who eats those.

I hate all these cookies.

Oreos gets a pass just out of nostalgia alone.

But yeah, interesting fact about the sort of democratic way that the BISCO goes about developing products.

There was an article that appeared in a nineteen thirty one issue of The New Yorker written by E.

B.

White, the man who wrote Charlotte's Web, and he describes his visit to the BISCO headquarters in New York and the very kind of casual way that employees could suggest new cookie ideas.

Presumably there was like a suggestion box, and then the bakers would make them and then test these products out by basically just leaving them out in the breakroom and watching to see how many were eaten.

And EB White writes in this piece, a baker makes up a trial batch off the new model and sends them upstairs, where they're placed in an open rack by the water cooler.

Employees may help themselves.

Everything is informal.

There are no charts or tables.

After a few days of elapse, the heads of the department simply meet and talk the thing over.

As soon as the cookie has passed its test, it gets a name.

We'll talk more about the Orio name later.

That's how Pablo Escobar ran his business too.

But Jacob in the meantime heals up and from his deathbed, rises with a vengeance and launches another new biscuit company with another guy and calls it the Loose Wiles Biscuit Company.

They really got to work on these names.

But with the burning hatred and drive born of this Cane and Able esque story, he brings the Loose Wiles Biscuit Company up into the number two biscuit slot in the country behind Nobisco, largely on the strength of one cookie, a shortbread and cream sandwich with an ornate stamp design called Hydrus.

So we have to backtrack here because the quiet part loud about Oreos is that they are a total ripoff of Hydrugs.

They came out in nineteen oh eight.

NBISCO files a trademark on Oreo in nineteen twelve, and it is granted in nineteen thirteen.

The first Oreo was sold on March sixth, nineteen twelve, to a grosser in Hoboken, New Jersey.

They were sold by weight, originally at a cost of two dollars and thirty five cents for nine and a quarter pounds.

The oreos cost a dollar eady five and the tin they came in costs another fifty cents.

The original oreos were ever so slightly larger than the ones we enjoyed today, and most importantly to me, they went on sale just a month before the Titanic set sale on her maiden voyage meeting.

There's quite possibly remains of early Oreo packaging on the ocean floor, although it departed from the UK, so it doubtful got over there, but people on board the Titanic may have been aware of oreos, and that's good enough for me.

They were eating hydrugs.

You know.

I just want to recap for a second, just because this story, mostly due to the really terrible corporate names, can be a little hard to follow, but it's amazing.

So two brothers start a cookie company, a cookie conglomerate.

The older brother works so hard that he then has to take a step back.

He's he's worked himself to the bone.

His younger brother makes peace with all the competing other cookie companies and they merge against the older brother's wishes.

The older brother gets well, and he's so angry that his younger brother has sold his own company out from underneath him that he makes a competing company to take them on.

And this competing company has made basically what's the prototype of Oreo, known as hydrox.

I just think that's amazing.

Canaan Abele doesn't even begin to cover it.

Here's what's funny about this.

Hydrugs were far more successful than oreos at the time.

The real power behind the throne at this point is the Jewish community.

In nineteen twenty four, Loose Wiles, the company behind hydrox, partnered with the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America to create the country's first kosher certification program, which, because hydroxes don't use lard in their cream whereas oreos did, made hydroxes enormously popular among the Jewish community, and this contributed to their early market dominance.

Nibisco attempted to hitch the Oreo name to a bunch of their other more successful products in displays and advertisements.

There's a wonderful anecdote of this copy from Serious Eats.

One in nineteen fourteen, one stores found itself with a surfeit of Oreos to the tune of seven hundred tins, so they slashed the price and literally berated their customers into trying to buy them.

Yesterday, we advertised those splendid oreos and they were a great bargain.

While we sold a few, they didn't move anything like we expected.

It's simply a case of you not knowing what a fine biscuit delicacy they are.

The customer, they're literally the principal skinner meme.

Is this cookie bad?

No, it's the customer who is wrong.

I love that, But you know they hydrouck Span.

These guys, they bungled an early lead man.

It's rough, yeah, I mean for starters.

There's that truly horrendous name, Hydrox.

It sounds terrible on the page, It looks terrible.

It looks like a Greek monster with like six heads.

It's awful.

They were looking for a product name that would evoke purity and goodness and good lord.

They failed, but they.

Maybe they succeeded too much and just evoked antiseptic sterility.

Right because I guess the name hydros came from the atomic elements of water, hydrogen and oxygen high DROs.

And this was surprisingly given how ugly it sounds and how it does not roll off the tongue in any way, it was actually a really common name at the time.

There was the hydrox arated table water.

There was hydrox ice cream, Oh God, and hydrox ginger ale, and as you mentioned, has a very antiseptic medical connotation and not something that you want connected with confections.

So perhaps because of the whole Warring Brothers thing for fifty years, loose Wiles really leaned on the whole copycat aspect of oreos.

They were really promoting hydrogs as the original beware of imitators.

There was one ad that featured a bear cub literally crying over stolen crease, and their ad copy use words like first and the finest, and the original and the only and the classic and Warren consumers don't be fooled by lookalikes.

So much finger wagging, I love it or did, however, I throat cookie World.

Yeah, exactly, Jacob.

The same year Jacob dies, the older brother who quit his body not even cold in the grave, Oreo sends out a series of ads that would change the world.

With no exaggeration.

I say this.

They promote the classic Oreo twist method of eating.

It's on street cars.

I believe it is the big one saying everybody's doing the Oreo twist.

Maybe they didn't say that.

I don't know, but that's where the twist dates back to his nineteen twenty three coincidentally, the same year the brother dies.

I just this whole thing is so Shakespearean.

They did the Oreo twist on his grave.

Hey.

By twenty fourteen, the Hydros name had fallen so far that Keebler Kellogg's let the trademark lapse and it was snapped up by Leaf Brands, who four years later filed a complaint with the FTC against Oreos, alleging that they hid Hydrox companies from customers on store shelves.

Oh, they hid Hydrox cookies from customers.

That was the basis of the suit.

I don't know if it was actually settled, but man talk about with my last breath.

I stab at THEE from Hell's Dark Heart, I stab at thee.

They went.

They just Hydrox versus Oreo.

Few to the century.

Wow, Yeah, I mean this was the Coke Pepsi of the early twentieth century.

We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more, too much of in just a moment.

Wow.

With hydrux dead and buried, Oreos were free to blossom.

So shortan tell us about that.

Yes, the Oreo went my many variations of their famous name over the years.

When they were first introduced in nineteen twelve, they were simply known as the Oreo biscuit, and then by nineteen twenty one the cookie embraced its shape and it was renamed the Oreo Sandwich, and in nineteen thirty seven the name was changed again to the distinctively high brow Oreo cream Sandwich.

And I was saying earlier at the top of the episode this was a way to play off the British biscuits that were served at tea time, and upon their initial launch, Oreos were marketed as fairly high end.

There's this amazing bit of ad copy from I think around nineteen twelve, when they were first unveiled and it describes the Oreo as quote two beautifully embossed chalk flavored wafers with a rich cream filling, which is over selling Oreos slightly.

And the final official name changed to Oreos came in nineteen seventy four when the cookie became known as the Oreo Chocolate Sandwich Cookie, or Oreo for short, and that's its official name to this very day.

Anyway, while we're on the topic of names, it's still anybody's guess where the term Oreo came from, but there are many theories.

It could be derived from the French word for gold, which was an early decorative element for the Oreo packaging.

But here's a grab bag of other explanations that are out there.

There's one theory that says that the name stemmed from the hill shaped test version that never made it to store shelves.

I guess the cream was piled up like a little mountain and that inspired this cookie prototype to be named Oreo, which is the Greek word from mountain.

So that's one theory.

There's another theory that says that the word Oreo is a combination of the ra from cream and sandwiching.

It just like the cookie between the two o's in chocolate.

Oh from chocolate, ree from cream, oh from chocolate.

It's a verbal visual pun.

It's not I I you don't know, I might.

I just want to say I want you to do you're doing like the drunk don draper like hand gesturing is.

It's just like the two o's and chocolate.

It makes makes story.

Roger Sterling throws up in the lobby.

I mean that's probably how this was name.

Right, They're all on cocaine.

Just zut it up, like, what should we call it?

Areo h very number three?

It stands for a rexigenic, which is a medical term for substances that stimulate the appetite.

I would tend to want to dismiss this out of hand, but considering hydrox.

Was his competitive name, uh maybe, Well, way do you get to the plant conspiracy theory, which is the next one?

Yes, yes, this is a really good one.

This is your personal favorite and probably mine too.

The decorations on the top of hydrox the hydrox cookie at that point included a mountain laurel.

And guess what genus of plant they belonged to?

The mountain laurel.

That's right, Oreo, Daphni, Oreo, daphne uh.

And this was bolstered by the fact that someone in Nibisco clearly had a thing for plants.

Of the cookies that Nibisco offered in nineteen thirteen, there's the Avena, the lotus, the helicon, the zephyrett, the zatona, the aola, the ramona, and Oreo, and those are all Latin or Botany names for different kinds of plants.

I just love the idea that there's like one drunk guy in the Nobisco copywriting thing.

He's like, I'm gonna name for plants no one will know.

While we're on the topic of that embossing that beautiful lorel wreath, it kind of looks like a manhole cover at this point.

When they launched, Oreos used a much more organic plant derived wreath for the emboss adding two pairs of turtle doves in a nineteen twenty four redesign.

The contemporary Oreo stamp was introduced in nineteen fifty two and it has remained unchanged ever since.

Every Oriole cookie contains ninety ridges, twelve flowers, twelve dashes, and twelve dots.

I feel like that's going to be a great trivia question at some bar trivia somewhere.

So remember that it's probably some kind of satanic numbering thing.

We'll get to that.

Many people on the internet credit a man named William Turnier who started as a mailboy at Nabisco with the four leaf clover and serrated edge design.

But Nabisco is cagy about it.

They will only confirm that a man by that name worked for the company during that time as a design engineer.

In a very granular bit of Internet dorkery, in the comments section of a twenty eleven New York Times magazine article about the Oreo embossing, a guy aiming to be William Turnier's son, Bill said that the original blueprints for the cookie are in his possession in North Carolina.

Did you go into the comment section of this twenty eleven New York Times magazine article about the oreo and bossing, I just protu scanning all the comment good.

Magician never reveals his secrets, Okay.

But William Turnier's son, the aforementioned Bill, was interviewed by Mental Floss, and he said that the design on oreos quote goes back to monks who used it on the bottom of manuscripts they copied in medieval times.

It was a sign of craft saying they did the best they could.

And there are some out there Internet sleuths, most likely who have noted the similarities between the Oreo design and the graphics used by the Freemasons and the Knights Templar, thus linking the beloved cookie with the Crusades, which I did not expect when we started this episode.

Bill also claimed that his dad modified the animal Cracker's box.

His contribution to that was adding the grass along the bottom, designed the logo for Nutter Butters and Milk Bones, and may have contributed to the design for the Rich Cracker.

William Senior left the East Coast and settled in Salt Lake City, where his grave marker features an Oreo.

Bizarrely enough, given their seeming silence on crediting him, Bill claims that Nabisco contacted his dad at one point to help confirm aspects of the Oreo's design in order to build a lawsuit against a company making a copycat cookie in Trinidad and Tobago.

Turn about his fair play Nabisco, But the only thing in the official Craft Archives four turnire is the receipt of a Suggestion Award in nineteen seventy two for an idea that increased the production of nilla wafers on company machinery by thirteen percent.

So the company reaches out to him.

They're like, hey, do you have the original blueprint for Oreos someone is trying to copy as a Trinidad and Tobaggo.

He's like, sure, I'll help you up, and they still like disavow his credit for that.

But yeah, So between Oreos, milk bones, nut butters, animal crackers, ritz crackers, and increasing the productivity of nilla wafers in nineteen seventy two by whopping thirteen percent, William Turnier maybe the secret MVP of the Oreos story.

I just wanted to do.

I want to do my transition.

Here is ding doom ding ding ding ding dom ding ding all right on my way?

Dum.

I would say that was terrible cut that that might went over much better in my head.

The name of the heading is Ori on my Way, like the song that's I'm rust send me on my Way.

That's that's not Rusted Root, is it?

Yeah?

I saw Rusted Root as a kid.

No way, Yeah, how'd that go for you's I'm sitting here talking to you.

Great, all right, that digression well and truly dead.

Now we arrive at the real heart of the matter.

Yes, the Oreo filling really the only good part of Oreos, if we're all being honest with ourselves.

This is the most heated you have been about anything in the months we've been doing this podcast.

I mean, I think there's there's no reason why Oreos should be as big as they are.

There's there's some part in effectively every way, just get on with it.

But yes, the Oreo filling.

The man credited with its modern incarnation is named mister Sam Porcello.

First of all, did you know that there's a reason why cream in Oreo is spelled cr e e because it contains no dairy and therefore cannot be marketed using the spelling of cream, which implies that cash is everywhere around me.

Also, while we're on the topic of cream, each original Oreo cookie is twenty nine percent cream and seventy one percent cookie.

That is the official ratio, and Oreo bakeries make more than one hundred and twenty three thousand tons of cream to fill their cookies each year.

That's incredible.

I want you to Viking funeral me into the Oreo cream.

Event it just put me on a pire and sent me on fire in the middle of one of those.

The gentleman who's credited with creating the modern incarnation of the Oreo cream mister Sam Porcello.

He arrived at Nabisco in nineteen fifty nine and worked there for thirty four years, retiring in nineteen ninety three.

Porcello's actual title was Principal Scientist, but his son described him as one of the world's foremost experts on coco, which eventually earned him the nickname the autorific.

Really, mister Oreos.

This is where it gets really wild.

Sarah Joyner is this woman who uncovered this.

It basically makes journalists look bad?

Is this whole story?

So, but go ahead continue.

I just want to credit her because she really did the leg work here.

Yes, ground zero for this whole theory that Porcello is the guy who created the modern Oreo filling appears in his twenty twelve obituary in the New York Daily News, which was then picked up by the blogging community around the world.

Yes, this woman Sarah Joyner researching Pacello in twenty twenty, reached out to Mondelez, which is the parent company of Oreo, and they told her it would be inaccurate to say that Sam Porcello invented the modern Oreo cream, and a former Oreo rep she was exchanging emails with said that she hadn't even heard of Porcello.

So there's some kind of erasure going on here at this time.

Orio really isn't like crediting the people who are behind.

You got the guy who invented the embossing, you get the guy who invented the modern cream.

Something's going on here, But it turns out that the real story is, as ever, very technical and boring.

Porcello what's largest contribution to the Orio cookie was in modifying the chemical composition of the filling so that it was solid at room temperature but melts ninety eight degrees as in when it hits your mouth.

But he shared those developments with three other food scientists, and basically the credit he gets for being mister Oreo pretty much comes down to the work of his own family's hagiography since his death.

This whole thing is so fascinating to me because if you look up Oreo and you look up oreo filling.

It's like lodged in seo.

But the original New York Daily News link is dead and you can only find it through the Internet news archives.

So the only link to this story is now in like it's like playing telephone.

It's only in blogs aggregating that story.

So one is on Time, the Time magazine website.

And so this woman, Sarah Joyner is researching this and it basically I think what happened was this New York Daily News guy knew or heard or got a tip about this guy dying and just interviewed his family, and his family was like, oh yeah, Dad was like, mister Orio, he invented the oreo filling.

But the more you dig into it, the more it turns out that, like he just refined the formula with a bunch of really boring food chemistry things related to filling solubility, and he retired nineteen ninety three, which, you know, we get into this next thing.

They take out lard in nineteen eighty four, and they take out the vegetable oils they replaced the lard with in two thousand and six, So by twenty twenty, his formula was already two recipes out of date.

And this woman, this Sarah Joyner, is it's very sweet because she's like talking to his son and she's like, oh yeah, like they wouldn't have kept up with the formula changes.

Like to them, their dad is still the guy who invented the Oreo filling.

Like their dad is still mister Oreo.

They didn't mean to mislead anyone.

It was just like lazy journalism.

Nobody bothered to fact check that.

And it's just I don't know, I find it very sweet in like this American life sort of way.

Like this family from Jersey is just like their dad is mister Oreo to them, and they told he always will be and he always will be.

And they told a single paper and the paper didn't bother to fact check it, and it's become fact anyway.

I just want to tell everyone that I titled this next section a Rabbi and a blowtorch walk into a cookie factory.

Remember how I said when hydrugs were hugely popular with the Jewish community because they were kosher, so Oreo, in their apparently never ending quest to bury all memory of their predecessor and salt the Earth, decided to alter their recipe and go kosher in nineteen ninety four, years after Burchello retired, or the year after Brichella retired.

Also nineteen eighty four, at a time when hydrocks barely exist.

Yeah right, they're like someone was just it's like a Monty Burns, Like one of the last surviving executives is like crush jocks.

This is so fascinating to me.

This guy, Joe Regenstein, professor of food science at Cornell and director of the Cornell Kosher and Lull Food Initiative, called this process probably the most expensive conversion of a company from non kosher to kosher in in two thousand and eight interview.

And this apparently started when a number of ice cream companies wanted to start using oreos in their products which were kosher and couldn't because of the lar so.

Nibisco owned approximately one hundred baking ovens, each about three hundred feet in length, and they all had to be converted to kosher, the process that literally involved a rabbi crawling through them with a blow torch.

Because the ovens were not kosher and baking is a dry, high heat process, each one of these units had to be heated to red hot temperatures.

Regenstein said, you need to use a blow torch to clean away the forbidden materials, so I tell my therapist.

Additionally, each oven contained a soft plastic belt that cost upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars at a time, and each of these needed to be replaced.

This process took three and a half years, wound up in nineteen ninety seven, after which I guess they got Zelda Reubinstein from the Poltergeist movie to come in and be like, this house is clean.

This all brings us to a larger question, how do you make an oreo?

Well, obviously, the official ingredient list is a closely guarded secret, and if we told you, we'd have to kill you.

But there are eleven major ingredients.

The hours follows sugar, unbleached flour, canola oil, high fructose corn syrup, baking soda, corn start, soile, liketin, vanillin, and chocolate.

And in an article celebrating the seventy fifth birthday of oreos from back in nineteen eighty six, this piece describes five hundred degree gas ovens as long as football fields, capable of cranking out two thousand cookies a minute, and to quote the piece an oreo takes less than an hour to make a half hour of mixing in bins the size of Volkswagen beetles, and another twenty minutes on the conveyor belts being pressed into shape and then bobbing along from the third floor to the first, through ovens and cooling tunnels, under the icing drum, and into machines that stack and deal oreos like cards into cellophane packages.

But the five folks at Nabisco have a rigid approach to quality control, and there are quote bins the size of hot tubs filled with broken oreo wafers, and some of these are ground up and reused in the batter, while others are sold to ice cream companies to be crumbled and mixed into their ice cream.

But about five percent of the cookies wind up b and R or broken and rejected and thrown away, And says haven't we all been b and R at one time or another?

As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages.

Next step we have a little section called Karma commer Comma, Karma, karma cavig Nope.

That was terrible.

Don't I swear to God if you don't cut that.

They replaced the lard with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, and then they subsequently replace that in two thousand and six with healthier and more expensive non hydrogenated vegetable oil.

Folks, if you're waiting for an explanation for what those terms are, wait longer, because I don't have it.

This came after the FDA in two thousand and three had announced new labeling requirements that required manufacturers to list transfats on their packaging.

Which are closely linked to heart disease.

Especially They're fine with doing it until they're being ordered to actually, well.

Yeah, they're doing it, yeah, every single company in the world.

So at some point this change in formula gave rise to the claim that Oreos are vegan, which is like one of the most commonly recited talking points about them.

But according to at least one check of their UK website, there's just the possibility of cross contaminations with dairy products at their facilities, and one extremely hard line vegan blog that I found they contacted the OREO directly in twenty ten and got the answer that, unfortunately for the militant vegans among us.

Some of the enzymes used to condition dough in processed goods are animal derived, so you've got the blood of microscopic organisms on your hands.

And some sugar suppliers use the animal derived natural charcoal bone jar in their sugar cane refining process.

So depending on your tolerance for animal products, and we are literally talking parts per million.

But if you're nothing, no shame.

If you're one of those people who's like, I want everything, I need to be completely free of the blood of animals, I don't think Oreos your ticket there.

Speaking of enormous multinational corporations, there is an entertaining story of some corporate subterfuge that entangled Oreo recently.

Recently ish in twenty fourteen, two California men were sentenced to prison time after stealing the formula for a chemical whitening agent called typ titanium dioxide from American chemical company du Pont.

So this titanium oxide dioxide from DuPont specifically is like the purest, like most sought after white pigment in the world, and it's jealously guarded, and so these guys broke in there and sold the formula to Pengang Group, a Chinese company that had been unsuccessfully trying to buy this formula for over twenty million dollars.

The conviction of these men in the court documents subsequently leaked to the fact that Oreo used this chemical to whiten their filling and had hit it from the ingredients list, which caused some concern because recent studies have flagged it as a carcinogen.

So all is not as pure white as the driven filling.

And speaking of oreos and countries with communist ties with whom we have a troubled relationship, did you know that oreos apparently weren't officially available in Russia until twenty fifteen?

Did you?

Did you?

Did you.

Look at me when I'm talking to you?

China got them a little earlier in nineteen ninety six, but they tanked when they were first released, to the point that they actually considered withdrawing Oreos from Chinese stores all together, but instead in the Bisco parent company at the time, Kraft decided to take a very ironically democratic approach and ask the Chinese consumers what they didn't like about Oreos so they could adapt them for that market, And after receiving feedback, they invented a new kind of Oreo to appeal to China, and it's more like a wafer.

It's four layers of a crispy cookie with a vanilla or chocolate cream center in the middle, not unlike a pirouette.

You know, those kind of long cigar shaped things.

Yeah, it's like that.

It's very, very, very different from the Oreo we know in love.

By two thousand and six, this Oreo wafer had become the best selling biscuit in China, just after a decade after they were considering withdrawing from the market altogether.

They were now number one and Kraft expanded the production of this adapted cookie into other parts of Asia, Australia and even Canada.

And they were all sorts of interesting international flavors of oreos.

There is blueberry ice cream and coconut delight in Indonesia, Argentina has a duo flavor Dulce de leche and banana, and China has green tea flavored and mango.

And in August of twenty eighteen, they released two savory flavored Oreo fillings, hot chicken wing and wasabi, which Jesus Christ.

This leads us to our patented section on gross Oreo flavors.

All right, so the original failure was a lemon I think they made lemon moringe.

They call it lemon morine Oreo in nineteen twenties, which discontinued.

I think that was released alongside like the chocolate Oreo when they first dropped in nineteen twelve.

Satists Golden Oreos are vanilla cookies with the same vanilla cream as the original Oreos.

Golden chocolate cream oreos, known as the quote uh oh Oreo until two thousand and seven, are the reverse of the original cookie vanilla cookies chocolate cream frosting.

But here's what you folks have been waiting for.

A semi complete list of other Oreo flavors, running the gamut from mildly offbeat to fully disgusting.

There's the famous birthday cake oreos good, Swedish fish, bad cream, sickle, banana split cream, really bad, Neapolitan.

Sure.

I don't even know what triple double means.

I guess that's triple stuff.

Yeah, yeah, good, good best so far.

Candy corn No, I don't like candy corn as a standalone thing.

Oreo as a subpar cookie coconut fudge.

Sure, aren't those just hop lungs or dosy does or whatever from the growth cut cookies?

Oh no, those are samoas and those are way better.

But that's fine.

Gingerbread, sure, candy cane, white fudge covered Okay, yeah, I don't even know how you do this.

Cookies and cream oreos.

I don't either, because that's cookies and cream is Oreo flavored, so it's an Oreo flavored oreo.

I know a cursive oreo.

No, I've gone across side root for your float.

No watermelon, terrible, marshmallow crisp.

I don't understand that.

No caramel, apple, no lime aide.

God, there's definitely Yeah, I mean pumpkin spice.

You have to That was good?

That was good?

Yeah, okay, it goes very good.

Cookie dough, Yeah, it's fine.

Red velvet cotton candy.

Sure, s'mores cinnamon bone, which is not on here was the best.

Oh have you had the churro shaped oreos?

No, I think they're just those.

The flavors are the same, they're just shaped like churros.

Oh I have seen those?

Yeah?

Yeah, yeah, No, I haven't had those yet.

Actually, I haven't had most of these.

I'm just judging from the name.

If you missed out on the chance to see these these limited edition Oreo flavors on store shelves, you're in luck.

There was an exhibit at the Museum of Failure in Los Angeles which has most of these flavors, although the exhibit might have closed by now.

It's also Coca Cola flavored Oreo, which I don't remember seeing that a synergy thing.

Yeah, somebody got paid.

Drunk John Draper right.

And hit the table.

And you know, I've often wondered in those twilight hours when I can't sleep and I'm pondering all the things that are going wrong in my life, and to try to make it so that I can't actually have a few moments of blissful slumber before I have to wake up and face another day of compiling these insanely researched episodes.

I think about, why, why with the good folks at Nibisco flood the market with these truly grotesque flavors Oreos more than fifty at this point, more often than not disgusting.

Well, apparently there's a method to their madness.

GQ interviewed a Coronell University behavioral economist named David just to explain this phenomenon.

The key is that Nabisco's not trying to introduce the flavors for long term consumption.

He says, you build in this idea of really tacky flavors, and that sort of builds this relationship to the consumer who likes to sort of check out these kitchy Oreos, he explained, and as an added bonus, many younger consumers basically give the company free pr by posting these new flavor reviews on social media.

So David just describes this approach by Oreos as quote, building a personality behind its brand.

I love them.

Do you buy that?

Sounds like corporate portions to me?

I mean I buy it.

I think it's a cheap and easy ole, relatively cheap and easy way of market testing new flavors that they can maybe enter into the mainstream.

And also, yeah, that's actually I thought I hell of a lot more about Oreos when they introduced some bizarre new flavor that more often than not I was curious about trying than I would have It was just the same old thing that had been around for one hundred and ten years.

So yeah, maybe, yeah, true all right, KGI good for them.

Uh.

Then, of course Oreos oreo O's cereal launched in teen ninety seven, discontinued in two thousand and seven everywhere other than South Korea, and relaunched ten years later.

And speaking of twenty seventeen, Virginia based the Veil Brewing Company released a version of their chocolate milk stout called a horn Swoggler that was infused with actual Oreo cookies.

I haven't tried it, don't know how I feel about it, don't care.

Uh, I'm not going to Virginia for chocolate stuff, even if it does have I can't believe it's taken us as long to get to double stuff.

Yeah, but like many things at the heart of America, it is a lot featuring not actually double but closer to one point eight six times as much stuff.

Those date back to nineteen seventy five.

Apparently it was like a high school class that actually crunched the numbers on that and figured out that it wasn't actually double stuffed.

It was like a big story.

A couple of years ago we mentioned the triple stuff, but that was not the biggest Oreo nineteen eighty four Oreo introduced the Big Stuff varietal, which is about ten times the size of regular Oreo Wow.

Sold individually.

Each Big Stuff contained two hundred and fifty calories, which that's actually which I thought thirteen grams of fat had tracks.

I saw an anecdote earlier that it took someone like twenty minutes to eat one at a sustainable pace.

Well, yeah, because it's like it's probably like saltines your mouth from a cookie, it's gets so dry.

It's probably hard to.

Eat three inches in diameter.

That can possibly be right?

How thick is it?

Oh?

Yeah, I guess that's true.

Okay, So let's say six on top, six on the bottom, or five on top.

Okay, I can see that how that would work.

The ad for the Big Stuff is on YouTube and it's pretty great, and naturally the jingle is a riff on Gen Nights Mister Big Stuff, because of course, and hell Oreo could afford it.

Well.

We mentioned earlier at the top of the episode that the classic Oreo twist behavior has been part of the brand's identity from very early on, back in the twenties.

But what does your preference for Oreo consumption patterns say about you?

Well, according to one widely disseminated study, and we use that term loosely done by craft.

In two thousand and four, they studied the habits of two thousand oreo eaters.

Dunkers are supposed to be quote energetic, adventurous, and social, while twisters are quote sensitive, emotional, artistic, and trendy.

And finally, biers are quote easygoing, self confident and optimistic.

That this is probably a bad time to ask which one are you?

Uh?

Is there a pithy phrase for when you just reach your hand into a bag of loose, crumbled ones and just kind of shove a fist full in your mouth.

Your bag is balanced on your stomach and you're watching Northern Exposure on a laptop instead of going on to work because you can't raise your head that day?

Is there a word for that?

That's the depression technique of eating oreos.

I mean, I don't understand the when you twist it apart.

Are you supposed to lick the center because you can't lick the cream because it's solid?

Well, you know, we have mister sam Porcello to think for that, right, But if you hold your tongue, yeah, like an art show exactly, you just hold it up to your tongue until the body temperature heats it up in a slide it off that I have no idea what I'm talking about.

I think honestly, like in all of my lockdown Bodega snack runs, I think they got nutter butters like everything.

I'm not at like a do both of us not like cornes?

Weird thing to come up an hour eight into this podcast.

They're fine.

No.

To me, it's like the sprite of cookies.

It's like that's what you have at the party when there's nothing else there, and.

You'll have it, but like, just feel something anything.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the love that people have for oreos, science has gotten involved more than once.

In the late nineties, Len Fisher, physics professor at the University of Bristol, claimed decades old mathematical formula describing capillary action, which is the phenomenon that describes how liquids cling to dry surfaces, could predict the perfect dunk time for a cookie, and using a formula from American scientist E.

W.

You wash burn and testing with ink blots first, he described the perfect amount of time for dipping quote regular British biscuits at three and a half to five seconds.

Crucially, though, he did not test oreos, and so in twenty sixteen, members of the Utah State University's Splash Lab stepped up to the plate and corrected this grievous error in a test of Oreos chips, ahoy nut or butters, and gram crackers.

They dipped the cookies halfway in two percent milk for half a second to seven seconds, and after dunking, the team weighed the treats and measured how much milk had been absorbed.

The results, I know you're dying to know.

Oreos absorbed fifty percent of their potential liquid weight in just one second.

After two seconds they absorbed eighty percent, and the number flat line briefly for a second, and after the fourth second the cookie maxed out.

It absorbed all its possible milk.

So if you were a dunk your oreos for more than four seconds, you're wasting your precious time on this planet.

So do with that what you will.

But for those taking their dipping seriously, which if you listen this far you probably do, there is a tool for dipping called the dipper DPR, which began with the kickstarter in twenty eleven, and it's been hailed as the latest and greatest in cookie spoons.

It exists that your oreo will be dipped evenly and you won't accidentally drop it in your milk, because, again, as you just said earlier, if your oreo is suspended in milk for more than five seconds, it's worthless.

Carry on.

I'm just gonna rend battled that all of these institutions are higher learning have put so much money and time towards oreos.

Instead of a desalemization or cancer cloud bursting any of these things, you could actually save the world.

While we're on the extremely academic studies of oreos, there was a study published by researchers at Connecticut College in twenty thirteen which states that oreos activate the same pleasure center in the brains of lab rats that was activated by cocaine and morphine.

The high fat and high sugar triggers the addiction hotspot in the brain, and one student also observed that the rats would quote break the oreos open and eat the middle first, one of the many ways that I am like a rat.

In a less behavioral study that has to do with oreos, I would like to discuss a little thing called the Oreo Run, which we've been teasing this the whole episode.

This was a hazing ritual that took place at an Illinois high school that made national headlines in October twenty eighteen, and, according to a piece in the registrar Star, ten football players were suspended for taking part in this event, the Oreo Run, which entailed running across the school's football field naked with an oreo wedged an oreo, shall we say, up there there were cram and oreos up there, left and right, left, right, and center, mostly center.

The offending parties were required to quote sit out three football games, although given the crime, I'm guessing that they probably stood.

No, not even a titter.

No.

I just I don't know, man, Just this stuff is soon really high school team.

So I just that's behaving at all, man, Like, Oh yeah, I mean I used to put cigarette buds out of my arms for like a party trick.

But I didn't put stuff up my ass, especially not food stuffs.

You know, I was told they were starving children across the world.

Yeah, your food is for your mouth.

Your family sweated for that food.

You don't put it in your ass.

It's a PSA, there's no trace of humor your voice whatsoever right now?

Genuine offense.

I mean, I mean, God bless you, all power to you.

I'm yes, I agree with you.

I agree with everything he was saying.

I this is the hill that we're gonna tie on.

Just bumps me out.

I don't know.

Weird.

Find find better to do with your life, people, Getness.

Book of World Records unsurprisingly has a lot of entries related to oreos.

On January thirtieth, twenty twenty, it closest the Western world ever got to true happiness.

Mondolaz employees from fifty five locations representing thirty two countries around the globe tuned in and set a new record for most dunked cookies simultaneously, five sixty six employees dunking at the same time, nearly two years earlier, in April twenty eighteen.

In April twenty eighteen, Mandolaz celebrated the opening of a plant in Bahrain with the largest oreo ever.

It was nearly one hundred and sixty two pounds, and it was subsequently distributed among frant employees and the local village.

Wow, so sorry, we don't I don't know I'm about to make it.

I don't know if they how well they paid them, they get some Oreos.

And lastly, per Guinness, oreos are officially the world's favorite cookie, available in more than one hundred countries around the globe.

Approximately thirty four billion Oreo cookies are sold each year.

That's ninety two million cookies per day, with ten billion of those cookies sold in the US annually, and an estimated five hundred billion Oreo cookies have been sold since they debuted in nineteen twelve.

That is enough to wrap around the Earth three hundred and eighty one times, or reach the moon and back five times.

Wow, this is where you're like, Yeah, send them to the moon, but not backs join run up.

I was gonna say, do something useful, use the ladder of the moon if I doesn't need them.

Well, folks, I did not foresee being driven to the brink of madness and back by what you've convinced me is a garbage cookie for idiots who knew it was oreos that broke both of us.

But looking back, the scribes will write of this evening, women will sing songs and lament, and our sons will mash their teeth and look skyward at all the oreos and circle in the globe and say, there's Papa.

Thanks for listening.

I'm Alex Cycle and.

I'm Jordan Runtag.

And that's the way the cookie crumbled us both.

Oh too much information was the production of iHeartRadio.

The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtogg.

The supervising producer is Mike Johns.

The show was researched and written and by Jordan Rundgg and Alex Heigel.

With original music by Seth Applebomb and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.

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