Yet Another Product with Delightfully Anachronistic Package Design!

EVER SINCE I CAN REMEMBER, I’ve enjoyed looking at grocery items packaged in cans, boxes and bags that somehow seem like they’re from a bygone era.

In fact, this little obsession of mine goes back so far that even as a strapping, ebullient boy I was fascinated with the anachronistic look of various grocery products when they were perfectly contemporary – yet I was so preternaturally forward-thinking that I envisioned how out of place they would be if for some inexplicable reason, decades later, they retained that same package design.

I also visualized myself as an adult keeping a blog and writing at length about this, though of course at the time, I had no idea what a “blog” was. I presumed it to be either some sort of farmable swampland or a hybrid frog/animal that starts with “bl,” though what really confused me is why the hell I would be writing about package design when surely my marshfarm with its unholy crossbred amphibimammals would be much more interesting.

Knowing this, it came as no surprise to anyone in my family when I was blessed with precocious puberty, though it wasn’t without its drawbacks. I recently bumped into my kindergarten teacher who confessed to me while it was handy having me around to rearrange the heavier classroom furniture, she was happy to advance me on to the first grade at the end of the year (She found the chest hair that peeked out of the collar of my striped Zoom rugby shirt “disconcerting.”) – this despite the fact that I had a lot of trouble differentiating lowercase p and q. I still think if she had bothered to sqend a little more time with me, I might have turned out puite differently.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there.  This is what you came here for:

This box of Nabisco Grahams looks like it’s from…the late 1960s.
Proof of Its Modernity: “NO HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP” on side panel.
Where You’d Expect to See It: On Miss Gibson’s desk – for snack.
Buy It Because: “NO HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP”

I got these in the 99¢ Only store – no surprise there. What’s startling is that they were really good and I wish I bought ten boxes. (Too late! They’re gone!)

Like you, I prefer my graham crackers to be liberally coated in cinnamon and brown sugar. But as a nude graham cracker goes, these are the best I’ve had. How did they end up in the 99¢ Only store? It’s a mystery. The bigger question is why Nabisco decided to give this the bright, bold package design look of the late 1960s. Am I complaining? No!

…Well, a little bit, but only because I just read the other side of the box and it turns out they were made in Mexico. Well, that clears up the first mystery, anyway.

Posted by Ted on September 10, 2011, 9:00 AM.