Most people love bacon. Even people who don’t eat meat or who are religiously prevented from consuming pork like the smell of it. It’s bacon, after all.
So, what could be an easier sales bonanza than quick bacon that you can grab in the morning on the way out the door? It’s like printing money. There’s only one problem. In the days before microwaves were standard kitchen appliances, there was no way to avoid hauling out the frying pan and dealing with the mess afterward. Or was there…?
Enter Reddi-Wip. Having struck gold with their ready-to-serve dessert topping, they decided to have a go at the most popular meat candy in the world.
Reddi Bacon took advantage of the fact that just about every kitchen in 1969 had a toaster. The company took bacon, cooked it down, then sealed the strips inside of a patented foil pouch. The foil would contain the residual fats cooked out upon the reheating, and by being conductive metal capable of withstanding the highest toaster settings, it avoided issues with melting or the bacon not becoming hot.
The development efforts went without a serious hitch. They only had to wait to get patent approval from the government for their pouch. Once that was achieved, Reddi Bacon went to market and was an immediate massive success.
It was not a success for very long. The pouches, you see, had to be thin enough for a hungry person to tear open without making the bacon fly all over the place. And an easily torn pouch is an easily punctured pouch.
People who tested the product were testing for taste, for ease, for heat transfer… they weren’t thinking of what would happen if a small tear in a pouch released bacon fat into a working toaster.
What happened was fire. Immediate, often raging fires from within plugged-in appliances.
So, um… I have no idea why nobody saw that coming. After all, bacon inside of a toaster, what could go wrong?
But I will say this: I kind of feel like going to get a piece of bacon right now.
Question of the night: What’s your favorite breakfast?