Dear Mr. Farms
I somewhat recently – I’ll get to it, promise – acquired several packages of your Pumpkin Spice Milano cookies, and I have to say I’m impressed. Not so much – actually, not at all – with the cookies themselves, but rather with the journey of self-discovery that these purported cookies sent me on. Well, okay, not self-discovery, but I actually found myself on a different journey of discovery after acquiring these cookies, including searching out new-to-me-but-old-flavor experiences, spending a lot of time thinking about “reclaimed” pejoratives, and researching what various small concerns like yours were doing with their packaging and ingredients to continue considering your current products as “[cookies] like grandma made, and that you remember, well Pepperidge Farm remembers [and will use this earnest, cynical nostalgia to gaslight you into thinking your grandma’s cookies were also baked while considering profit to her investors over quality.]”
This whole saga of self-discovery started at Mr. Target’s Emporium of Fine New and Used Goods. I had gone over to his website and saw that my local outpost of his fine store had your Pumpkin Spice Milano in stock, but that turned out to be a lie – must’ve been a ChatGPT hallucination in the stocking algorithm, amirite? He had plenty of your other fine Milano variants (Milano Variants… that phrase sounds familiar… was that a Mozart composition? A COVID mutation? A chess opening?) in stock, but sadly, there were no Pumpkin Spice Milanos. Anyway, I had to find your fine cookies from another source, which meant ordering them online. Perhaps, if Mr. Target hadn’t been cutting workforce and had accurate stocks, I wouldn’t have gone down quite the rabbit hole that I did… but we are a part of this world, and the war on low shareholder returns does indeed affect us all.
While I waited for your cookies to be delivered, I pondered pumpkin spice in general, and I realized something, sir. Now this is hard to believe, and I’m kind of surprised at myself, but as I thought about it I realized I’d never actually had something pumpkin spice flavored. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love me a pumpkin pie, I eat the hell out of some pumpkin pie every autumn, I’m talking something branded as being “pumpkin spice.” I realized that I didn’t actually have any context for understanding what your cookies might taste like. Now, I’m not a knee-jerk hater of pumpkin spice, I just somehow never dipped my toe in the endless stream of pumpkin spice products that, every autumn, flows like molasses in a Boston summer.
So I decided that in order to give your cookies a fair shake, I’d have to head to my local branch of Mr. Starbuck’s Fine Coffee Roasters and try the original Pumpkin Spice Latte, or, as I understand they are also called, PSL. So I drove myself over and ordered one from the drive-thru, and…
Look, I dunno what I was expecting, but that drink inspires such love and such hate all at the same time that I was really expecting something that wasn’t aggressively middle of the road. It was a damn overly sweet latte with cinnamon and nutmeg and maybe a hint of ginger. Absolutely nothing special. Nothing to hate, nothing to love. It was… fine [pejoratively]. It was… fine [neutrally]. It was… fine [positively]. It… existed. It… did not give me any hopes for your cookies.
But this got me thinking further, sir. Milanos, as I remember them, were less cookies, per se, and more of an aspiration. I always remember liking your Milano cookies just fine, but I also remember that they weren’t, like, a Chips Ahoy or whatever. Milanos were, somehow, sophisticated? A treat? As an adult, who bakes for fun, I don’t really consider any cookies I can get at the grocery store a treat, and I’m sad to say that your cookies are caught in that particular personal backlash. But as a kid, I do remember eating your Milano cookies, and I particularly remember how they were prized by people who I’d call “classy-trashy.” Classy enough to want something European-inspired, but trashy enough not to not bother going to the local European bakery or grocery to get something actually European. Also, please note here that I’m not using the phrase “trashy” here as a class signifier. Your cookies have always been on the spendy end of cookies one can get at their local greengrocer’s. Its trashy in the way that a lot of mid-and-late twentieth century American culture was trashy: don’t go out of your way, don’t step into situations that might be 3% outside your comfort zone, don’t go to the local shop, find the fanciest thing you can at the grocery store and call it a day. It’s the lack of effort and curiosity that’s trashy, not the amount of money being spent. Hell, your cookies go for around $13 a pound these days; you can go to an actual bakery and spend approximately the same amount for the same amount of cookie, and those cookies will be handmade and actually classy. Hell, I can order fancy Italian cookies from a well-known high-end bakery in Brooklyn for $20 a pound shipped, and I’m not even getting into the damn Williams-Sonoma catalog here.
Look, I know I’m going on a bit here, but this is really your fault if you think about it, Mr. Farms. If you’d talked your friend Mr. Target out of using ChatGPT to keep track of his inventory, I’d have just bought the damn cookies in the store, eaten them, and then I wouldn’t have gone on this journey. Instead, well, here we are.
What I realized next, as I was thinking about how your Milano cookies fit into a specific sliver of American class consciousness, was that the three main things I was thinking about – your Milano cookies, Mr. Target’s Emporium, and Mr. Starbuck’s Roasters (and especially his PSL’s) – all fit into a specific reclamation of a pejorative that’s been enjoying a heyday these last few years, specifically all the women who proudly proclaim themselves “Basic Bitches.” Now, again! I don’t see anything particularly wrong with the label, especially when it’s self-chosen. I do, however, find the transition of language, especially in this area, fascinating. In the eighties, when I was a kid, the folks I knew who would buy Milanos and put them out on a spread for a party so they’d seem sophisticated would never call themselves a bitch, even in a reclamatory way. Now, a PSL and a Milano is, like, IDK, a basic bitch girl dinner or something, and girl dinners are fascinating because it’s effectively any sort of filling snack plate that looks fancy but requires minimal preparation… just like the classy-trashy times of the eighties! Salami, cheese, and grapes! Avocado toast and wine! Milanos and a PSL! And look! You don’t need to go to the cheesemonger, the farmer’s market, the butcher, and the Cuban bakery, you can get it all at your local grocery store – or even Mr. Target’s Emporium!
Actually… BRB. A small plate of salami, cheese, and fruit actually sounds really good right now. Girl dinner for me!
Cool, thanks for waiting, I’m back. I feel much better now.
Anyway, I hasten to point out again that the length of this letter is kinda your fault, because this is all stuff that I thought about between ordering your cookies online, and them showing up at my door. The rest of this letter, on the other hand, is definitely your fault. Because eventually, the two-pack of cookies arrived.
There were a couple of truly fascinating things about these cookies, but chief amongst the fascinating things was the aroma. As a newly-minted expert in all things pumpkin spice, I knew what I expected when I opened the package. Instead, what I got was the unmistakable scent of uninspired gingerbread. Is there cinnamon and nutmeg? Eh, kinda? Is there a buttload of ginger? Oh yeah.
Look man, I know every spice mix is a spectrum, and that’s fine; if I get a Madras curry spice mix from two different brands I know they’re not going to taste the same, I don’t expect every adobo spice pack from every brand to taste the same, but I have a feeling that’s not what’s happening here. Because here’s the second thing: There are fifteen cookies per bag of Milanos, divided into three little paper-muffin-cup packages of five. Of those fifteen cookies… only three per bag were intact. Look man, I know these cookies were shipped, and that every step from the warehouse to the other warehouse to another warehouse to a distribution center to my house was handled by a criminally underpaid gig worker who just wanted to meet their quota, but even still. Even still. You, sir, of all people, must remember when your grandmother, during prohibition, would still buy off-label illicit rum to make her fruitcakes that she sent to her family, sometimes by courier. You know your products will be shipped. Your products have always been shipped, with varying levels of care.
This isn’t a science fiction situation, where you can somehow blame the delivery vehicle’s Package Structural Integrity Field System’s failure to push responsibility off yourself. Because here’s the third thing: these cookies were absolutely assembled by a barbarian. These cookies were slapped together by a machine so ill-tuned that it makes a CyberTruck look like a model of precision engineering. These cookies look like a rusted-out jalopy puttering down the right hand lane of the New Jersey Turnpike at three in the morning, driven at thirty-seven MPH by someone who knows their car doesn’t belong on the road and just needs to get to exit 7A so they can get off the road before they’re caught in the slipstream of a speeding souped-up Honda and their superglued spoiler gets ripped off and thrown into the bushes. The orange pumpkin-spice mix gel was applied like a three-year-old getting her hands on her older sister’s My First Instagram Influencer kit’s eyeliner. The chocolate is well applied, but the cookies are misaligned in places by almost half a centimeter; it's like one half of your machine was running Imperial measurements and one half was running metric. The cookies are SO misaligned that it looks like they weren’t actually placed, but rather half the cookies were dropped onto the other half like leaves coating an autumn lawn, and any cookies that passed 95% coverage were called “inspected” by your quality control department. Seriously: if a US Mint made coins as misaligned as every single one of these cookies is, there would be no secondary market for mis-strikes and we wouldn’t have a numismatism industry in the US because no two coins would look the same.
On top of that, the cookies themselves are misshapen. Half of them look like damn Nutter Butters they’ve got such hyperbolic concavities on their sides, and that shadow-duck-looking “distinctive” drip-bulge is missing on, like, half of them – or at least as near as I can tell, because, as I may have mentioned, these cookies look like they went eight rounds in an amateur boxing match, and most of them bear more resemblance to the ingredients for a Manhattan cheesecake crust than they do cookies.
I’m actually kind of shocked, sir - all those people I knew in the 80s who would buy your cookies and call themselves sophisticated would look at these weird childish broken mutant cookies, and never drop a cent on your product again. Seriously, I almost want to include a picture of your misaligned cookies just so you can also shake your head, sir, and say “wtf” along with me… but I won’t. And here’s why.
Actually, before we get to the real punch, let’s get back to the incompetent gingerbread aroma of these cookies. Yes, pumpkin spice is a spectrum, but there are some things that most people seem to agree on, and that’s pumpkin spice should be cinnamon and nutmeg forward. These cookies are not that. These cookies smell like gingerbread. I’d bet dollars to stale Captain Crunch covered doughnuts that if I were to acquire a package of your “Limited Edition Gingerman Cookies” – which I won’t, because they ring in at a truly impressive $40 per pound, which, again, I could get two pounds of actually good Italian bakery cookies shipped to me directly from Brooklyn for the same price – that they would smell exactly the same.
So here are my data points: a recipe that can absolutely be reused without having to pay your flavor scientists another dime, incompetently and inconsistently baked cookies that were then slammed together by Throgdor the Barbarian, cookies that have less structural integrity than a catnip tea-soaked thermal paper cat toy, and then, the final data point: The Internet.
Yes, I know the internet is a pit of iniquity, but if you search for “milano cookies change” you get literally thousands of results of people complaining about how your cookies suck now, starting early in the year of our lord 2022. It’s well documented that because shareholders and other assorted rich folks were only making significantly more money during the pandemic than they were beforehand, they started pushing back on most consumer companies to make their products smaller and worse… and I think that’s exactly what’s happening here. I haven’t had a milano in a very long time, to be honest, but I remember them being, well, better than this. Your cookies, sir, are lighter and thinner, and don’t taste as good, with a mildly chemical taste to them. That might be some sort of bottom of the barrel “natural” flavor, but it also might well be too much leavening in the baked portion of these cookies, meaning you can extrude just that much less material for each cookie, which doesn’t save any money per cookie, but would buy one of your shareholders a nice fifth F-150 in aggregate.
In short, now that I’ve had your cookies, I’m convinced that your company has been entirely captured by the quest for capital in every way, to the point that the only thing you “remember” about your grandmother’s cookies is that they existed, and that you’ve somehow convinced yourself that she’d prefer increasing shareholder value to making a nice plate of cookies for you, her grandson.
In short, sir: you have disappointed me, 80’s era classy-trashy suburban moms, basic bitches, and your own grandmother. You should be impressed with yourself, at least in one way: that’s a wide spectrum of folks, with a wide range of opinions, to insult and disappoint. It’s an impressive achievement – I just wish it wasn’t such a sad one.
Sincerely,
Alex Parise
