Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Bi-lingual Potato Chips?

Met the Wife for lunch yesterday. There's a new restaurant that the city of Columbus gave a couple of thousand to so they could upgrade the front door, or something.

Anyway, we heard it was a good place to eat, so we gave it a shot.

It was okay. Not great. But good. We'll go back.

But this isn't a restaurant review. Heck, my idea of a good place to eat has a clown on the door.

Instead, I noticed something really odd. The potato chips were bi-lingual. They were in English. And in another language.

Miss Vickie's Potato Chips had everything in two languages.

Now, Miss Vickie's, in case you didn't know, is owned by Frito-Lay, Inc. Out of Plano, Texas. That Frito-Lay.

You remember Frito-Lay, don't you? Of course you do. You see their stuff everywhere you go. And it looked to me like they've jumped on the bi-lingual bandwagon.

So, who's surprised that the company that got into all kinds of trouble several years back over the Frito Bandito now does the bi-lingual thing?

Well, I was.

"Why?" you ask. No, really. Go ahead and ask.

I'm glad you asked.

Because the second language wasn't Spanish.

It was French.

Yes, it's true. Miss Vickie is French.

I mean, who knew?

She has a drawing of a farm on the front of the bag. Nothing to indicate it's a French farm. Except for the fact that you don't see anyone working. But then, again, it's just a drawing of a farm. Nobody lying around or anything.

But, it turns out she's not French. Just French-Canadian.

Of course, if you're Canadian, you knew that. Or perhaps if you're from the States near Canada, you knew that all along.

But I didn't.

See, I never claimed to be all that smart. As you can obviously tell by now.

Anyway, Miss Vickie's, originally a Canadian company located in Quebec, was bought out by Frito-Lay in 1993, as it turns out. And Frito-Lay has kept the Canadian feel to Miss Vickie's chips.

Depsite the fact that they offer the chips in Jalapeno Flavored and in Mesquite BBQ Flavored. So it turns out that the French maid has gone to bed with the Frito Bandito.

I'm not sure what that tells me. Other than I'm wondering what they'll do when they're required to print their bags in Spanish also. Will the French get dropped? Or the English?

Or will the cover of the bag just get crowded? Like the restaurant we ate at wasn't.

Cross-posted at aTypical Joe

4 comments:

  1. Yup. We had lots of French/English products when we lived in Northern Minnesota.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Now There's Bi-lingual Potato Chips?...

    Go ahead - take a guess. Here's betting that you're wrong!...

    ReplyDelete

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