Sunday, March 17, 2002

Failed products

Some time last year I first saw some green ketchup from Heinz. It looked disgusting, so I figured it was just the thing for a 7 year old relative. He loved it of course.

The stuff was still on sale when I last looked. Yecch.

Mercifully most products like that fail. And there is a museum dedicated to failed products in Ithaca, NY. It's probably good for a few laughs.

Sometimes the name is the problem. I suspect that this is what happened to a nodular food supplement named "Gorilla Balls". If you want to Google for that one, be my guest. ("No Watermelons" could use some work too, but hey, I tried about a dozen others first. It's a reference to environmentalists, who are often green on the outside and red on the inside.)

My favorite from the link above was "Maalox Whip, the dessert topping that controls diarrhoea. ". Honorable mention for the "PMS Crunch" and garlic fruitcake.

I think I first heard of this museum in Audacity magazine. This was a spinoff of American Heritage, dedicated to business history. One of the features was about corporations that had gone out of business. Unfortunately Audacity has ceased publication.

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