Time for some hot takes here we go:
Jaffa cakes are cakes. Penguins are chocolate bars. Mini cheddars are biscuits. Jaffa cakes may be technically cakes, but they're packaged like biscuits and when you go for Jaffa cakes. Are you in a cake mood or a biscuit mood. Similar with penguins. A penguin isn't even much more biscuit than a twix is, and that's ubiquitously a chocolate bar. Penguins are individually packaged, and when I want a chocolate bar I p-p-pick up a penguin. And when I want a biscuit I eat a bourbon. And don't come at me with the fox's Christmas biscuit boxes because we both know that's different. And for mini cheddars, you know the routine by now, but when I grab a bag of mini cheddars it's to satiate that itch for something small and crunchy and delicious and, not for something more substantial and multi-bite. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
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We was chocolate before chocolate was cool.
It was a great idea, before its time. Oh, and I didn’t exactly know what I was doing.
The late 1990s and early 2000s saw me straying into some areas that were a result of my arrogance and ignorance. I haven’t written yet about my short, disastrous foray into comic book publishing, but it led into a fun, but equally calamitous venture. Chocolate bars.
Long story, short, in 1997 I put together a few people to invest to save storied, but troubled underground comix publisher Kitchen Sink Press, founded in Princeton, Wisconsin, but relocated in Northampton, Massachusetts. In addition to comics, the company put out all sorts of artist tangential products like trading cards, cloisonne pins, and my favorite and their best selling product, R. Crumb Devil Girl Choco(late) Bars. When it was clear that KSP was going to continue being a black hole of financial losses it shut down. Clearly, I had no idea how to usefully help the company, and my living in Los Angeles with the company 2,920 miles away didn’t help one bit.
I’d lost a lot of money, including my wife’s savings and my kid’s college fund, and I really wanted to earn it back for my family’s sake. Fast forward, I did, but certainly not in the KSP spin off I conceived.
For reasons best sorted out with a therapist, I love everyday objects that have cool images printed on them. Skateboards, T-shirts, posters, you get the idea. So the fact that chocolate bars are obsessions of a lot of people, no matter their age, gender, location, and the R.Crumb and Fabulous Freak Brothers bars being a hit that I felt KSP had ignored in their plight, I got the bright idea of partnering with a Massachusetts based KSP consultant to launch a company named True Confections, solely in the business of boxes of chocolate bars with cool images printed on them.
Can’t go wrong, right?
As I write this post in 2024, it’s pretty common to find “cool” candy bars in gourmet markets around the country. But, that wasn’t the case in the 00′s. We came up with some pretty neat designs (a few of them above), and our sales team did pretty well too. We sold pretty successfully everywhere from Toys’R’Us to Home Depot to my local Santa Monica pharmacy (they could keep Devil Girl’s in stock!). But, we didn’t know how to source the bars with good chocolate at a good price, and of course, we had no idea how to ship the candy properly when the weather turned hot. Long story short, True Confections was eating money faster than KSP was, and honestly, I got sick of eating chocolate myself.
It was fun while it lasted, but like I said up above, we were ahead of our time.
And, as I’ve learned, over and over, a great idea is all well and good, but if you can’t execute... well, that’s that.
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SO BAD, THEY'RE GOOD FOR YOU!
PIC(S) INFO: Spotlight on R. Crumb's Devil Girl Choco-Bar box art/illustrations, c. 1994 -- a photoset by Fred Seibert via Flickr (pics uploaded July 2021), artwork by Robert Crumb.
MINI-OVERVIEW: "The sturdy display box, modeled after cigar boxes of an earlier era, contains fifteen milk chocolate bars and was created in 1994 as a promotional item to accompany the release of Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 "Crumb" documentary. Inside the box, anti-marketing slogan warns the consumer about the dangers of indulgence in this particular chocolate flavored vice: "It’s BAD for you!""
-- THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD OF MARBL (Manuscript Archives and Rare Book Library)
Source: www.flickriver.com/photos/84568447@N00/sets/72157630745801838.
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