Kudos to the almighty YouTube algorithm, for knowing its users better than they know themselves. It recently served this Grocer journalist the channel of Chris Spargo, a content creator who delivers deceptively dull mini-documentaries answering the least important questions in grocery (and some other fields). Who could resist a click?
In his latest this week, Spargo provides the definitive answer to why UK crisp packets changed their colourways – swapping salt & vinegar’s blue for green, and vice versa for cheese & onion.
Walkers has always followed the current tonal attribution to the flavours. So why do so many people have the “false memory”, as Spargo puts it, of it being otherwise? Well, Walkers is the outlier, viewers learn, with 1980s leading brand Golden Wonder having etched its way into the prevailing national common knowledge. And “if you’re buying the supermarkets’ own brand you’re still using the old Golden Wonder colour scheme” Spargo says, before a suspenseful pause. “Or so I thought.”
After scouring archive photographs of supermarket aisles, Spargo – who likes to speak to camera in the greyest, dullest looking locations he can find – finds own-label switched to the Walkers way at some point in 2013. “And we didn’t even notice” he says, as ominous music plays in the background.
In another short, Spargo digs into why so many UK supermarkets have a clock tower. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he notes. “This isn’t a town square, it’s a car park.” The exhaustive investigation leads to an Essex council’s design guide from 1973 and a 14th century barn.
Who knew such mundane minutiae could be so gripping?
No comments yet