From school cafeterias to professional athletes, Uncrustables sandwiches are everywhere
From school cafeterias to professional athletes, Uncrustables sandwiches are everywhere
Uncrustable sandwiches have been around for over 20 years, but recently they have been garnering attention from professional athletes, singers, and social media influencers. This sudden increase in attention has led to higher sales numbers for the J. M. Smucker brand and the Uncrustable is on its way to being a billion-dollar business. The meteoric rise may come as a surprise since the product is a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but perhaps the simplicity is what led to this explosion.
“Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Clint Rainey, a contributing writer for Fast Company, about his story on how the sandwich came to be so popular.
Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.
Kai Ryssdal: Uncrustables — basically a peanut butter and jelly sandwich of sorts — is going to be a billion-dollar brand. Are you kidding me?
Clint Rainey: It’s pretty nuts to think about, isn’t it?
Ryssdal: Yeah! What? How?
Rainey: I mean, I think that this is one of those, you know, great success stories. You have a company, Smucker, that has for over 100 years — like 125 years — been producing these like basic pantry staples, peanut butter, coffee, baking mixes, shortening, and realized at a certain point that they had jelly, they had peanut butter, they could probably figure out bread. And if they just put those things together, they had the ability to crank out a reinvention of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that, you know, appealed to not just parents for kids lunches, but athletes who are looking for, you know, a quick way to refuel.
Ryssdal: Yeah well, we’ll get to the athletes in a second. So we should say first of all, Smucker’s did not invent the Uncrustable. But they did sort of launch it. They’ve been around for a long time, it’s not like uncrustables are new, right? They’ve been around for 25-26 years, right?
Rainey: Right. The reason that I wrote the story was that these things were just starting to pop up everywhere. I was seeing them on social media. I was seeing them at halftime shows, Charles Barkley coming on, you know, during a basketball game talking about how he likes stocks in his freezer. So Smucker purchased the brand from two dads in the Midwest in 1998. And they you know, they went straight into cranking away on these things. And you know, the expansion of the brand and the growth of the product has been almost entirely organic. So organically people were snatching these things up, but there was no marketing behind it yet.
Ryssdal: And look, you don’t need marketing when Charles Barkley is talking about them in a halftime show. And Travis Kelce, for crying out loud, is saying he eats more of them than anything else. Look, I get that it’s convenient, and all that, but fundamentally, it’s peanut butter and jelly sandwich, right?
Rainey: No kidding. And I think it sort of became — I don’t want to call it an inside joke, but I mean, sort of, right? Like, there was some reporting that the Baltimore Ravens ate 7,500 of these things last NFL season? You know, hey just sort of become this like cultural artifact, especially in professional sports, where it’s, you know, something everybody can kind of laugh about.
Ryssdal: Here’s the kicker question: Have you tried one of these?
Rainey: I have. And I will admit, with some level of embarrassment, that I had not before I started writing the story. But I went out — I live in New York City — and you know, there’s a lot of things that are difficult to find in New York, I did not struggle to find Uncrustables. I had advance warning that they were going to be in the frozen section, which I was told by multiple people at Smucker is a source of confusion for consumers. They don’t necessarily think to make a beeline for the for the freezer aisle.
Ryssdal: Are you supposed to microwave them to thaw them or what do you do?
Rainey: Apparently, absolutely not. But there is an entire cottage industry on Reddit and other forums online of people who are suggesting ways that you can improve them. And that involves air fryers, and and microwaving and it’s insane, but some people want to remove the tiny little crimped edges that…
Ryssdal: Oh no! You’re un-crusting the Uncrustable? C’mon, man!
Rainey: It’s insane, right? I mean, at that point, you have to assume it just oozes out the side but that I didn’t try so I can’t swear to it.
Ryssdal: Peanut butter and jelly. It is ripe for disruption.
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