Shame you missed the 80s then. Weetabix (yeah, that’s right, it’s Weetabix) decided that the ideal mascots would be a skinhead gang. What better brand ambassadors for a breakfast-centric slab of wheat dust than a yobbo youth sub-culture.
Sometimes I’m really really tempted to hop under the eurotunnel and beg the French to give me citizenship.
Weetabix, fucking skinheads… honestly.
I think you’re underestimating how popular a lot of British chocolate brands are worldwide. It’s just that people often forget they’re British, including you.
The best apparently came from Fleet Street.
To each his own. Steak and kidney pie is the thing that made me believe it might be possible to live forever and never get bored. I could eat them forever.
Mash is just mashed potatoes. Toad in the hole contains no actual toads. Honestly, if you want to be put off by the name of a food, start here.
Remind me to explain to you the basic functional difference between a bath and a shower, sometime.
Weetbix Downunder. Yumm.
My teenage son can eat six as a snack, with milk of course. And brown sugar.
Me, I prefer to eat Weetbix with butter and jam - jelly for you. Alternating with Marmite or Vegemite (another Downunderism).
Lots of roughage and very filling. Mmmm.
Weetabix with jelly? As in what we would call jam? I have never ever heard of that and cannot believe it would suggest that on the packet.
Allow me to bring light into this benighted world.
I’d completely forgotten about that. A very strange ad campaign given the fact that Eighties skinheads were associated with the far right political groups.
I remember when I was a kid in the late sixties/early seventies almost every breakfast cereal would have some kind of freebie for kids, Batman transfers, football busts, cut-out Kings and Queens of England, car kits, Thunderbirds models, Captain Scarlet badges and many more.
And Sugar Smacks were so much better than Sugar Puffs…
Weetabix clearly had to be mashed up in the milk and then huge dollop of honey slapped in the middle, ready to be swished around.
If you didn’t do that then you were doing it wrong.
Is it spelled differently in Australia?
Differently? Well not really. Correctly to be accurate.
Much as it sticks in my craw Weet-Bix, the breakfast cereal, was developed by Bennison Osborne in Victoria, Australia in the mid-1920s. Well done that man.
I was talking mostly about chocolate, rather than chocolate bars, of which the chocolate itself is often not the most important criterion of deliciousness. Our chocolate itself is nothing special. And I suppose I was taking being “known for chocolate” as meaning being known for the good quality of our chocolate. I suspect any international popularity is largely down to historical reasons, and I bet most of them are Nestlé bars. But fair point, if true.
On the other hand, if people often forget the chocolate is British, then maybe we’re not that known for chocolate!
Isn’t Nestlé a Swiss company?
Yeah, that was part of the point.
We are known for chocolate; real chocolate. Chocolate of the Milk Chocolate variety. Unlike the Dark Chocolate muck they sell in Belgium.
Is it called Weetabix and not Wheatabix because, like Froot Loops that doesn’t contain actual fruit, Wheetabix doesn’t contain actual wheat?
So, that stuff was actually made from compressed wood! It would certainly explain both the high fiber content and flavor.
So that explains Pykrete. Freeze Weetabix in water. Build air base on the resulting unsinkable fiber-and-ice island. Win the Arctic War.
A few years back, there was a major effort to increase sales of British cheese in the US. Suddenly, there was real Cheddar, and double Gloucester, and Stilton, and Wensleydale, and what have you in American markets at reasonable prices.
Unfortunately, it happened in the early '90s so…you know (for a short while, prices became extremely reasonable). And then the dollar bubble burst. And then there was the whole foot and mouth thing…
In the US, they just plain aren’t available to a large extent.
Cadbury and Kit Kat are well known but, of course, Rowntree and Cadbury sold their souls to Hershey long before the Nestlé and Kraft takeovers…much to the annoyance of Nestlé and Kraft.
Many British producers simply aren’t interested in getting involved in (and subsequently consumed by) the vast and crowded US market. Likewise, American companies like Heinz and Mars aren’t keen on competing with themselves.
Items that aren’t already available are typically imported in relatively small quantities, generally in the original retail packaging. Since EU labelling doesn’t meet US standards, packages have to be relabelled, which is expensive and time-consuming (basically, you have to pay people to paste new nutrition labels and UPCs over the old ones).
The upshot of all this is that many common British foodstuffs are only available in specialty markets and very, very small supermarket sections at inflated prices.
Proper British and Irish cheeses are available in supermarkets in northern New Jersey, though not as much as my wife wishes. (She spent a summer doing theatre in Glastonbury, so her Yankee palate is permanently defiled.)