Dear Mr. Vlasic
Dear Mr. Vlasic,
Thanks for coming to talk to me today, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule. No, no, I don’t actually need anything from you. This is what they call a come-to-Jesus, Mr. Vlasic. I’m worried about you. The stress has obviously been getting to you, sir, and I don’t mean the stress of running a cucumber concern.
Who is it, Mr. Vlasic, and what is it? Who are you covering for? Does someone in your family have a gambling problem? Does a cousin owe money to the mob? Does your brother-in-law owe money to the mob? Is it you? Did you partake in some youthful dalliances? Or perhaps some more adult… indiscretions? Perhaps with a pickle slicer? Has the news of your sordid past come out in the form of blackmail and you need some quick dolla dolla bills to pay off a slimy paparazzo who’s holding your peace of mind hostage? Did your son, the young Master Vlasic, try his hand at day-trading off a bad insider tip from the Trump Boys and now you need some sweet cash to cover some short calls? Or is it simpler? Did your mistress tire of your bad Pickle Rick routine and clean out your Venmo after your good buddy Elon Musk changed your phone’s passcode to the “secure” but actually easily guessable 69420 and now you need a quick cash infusion to top off the ol’ checking account before your long-suffering wife notices the shortfall?
Or maybe I’m wrong! Maybe it isn’t personal. Is it the business, sir? Is there a problem at the pickle mill? Have your brine engineers been talking unionization with the Lactobacillus Wranglers Local No. 637? Times are hard for us all, have the rangers you’ve been working with to keep the imprisonment of your mascot stork in captivity in contravention of the Migratory Waterfowl Act of 1918 under the radar suddenly told you your previous wink-wink-nudge-nudges weren’t enough? Does daddy need a new extruder?
I know these are very personal questions to ask, sir, but I feel they’re required, because I was recently at my local greengrocer’s and came across your new product, Vlasic Pickle Balls Corn Puffs, and there are only a few ways for this to go. Either someone in your family is in Circumstances, the pickle mill is in need of a hot cash windfall, or you’ve decided to sell out your brand on the most naked, cynical, nostalgia-trend-train-hopping cash grab either humanly or corporately possible.
No, no, sir, don’t try to leave the room just yet, my associates with their racquetball paddles are standing there for a reason. We’ll finish our little discussion, and then you’ll be free to go.
Whatever the reason is, sir – and I understand if you don’t want to tell me, but know that you can trust me, I won’t tell a soul – I can’t really see it as anything other than misguided. Because… flavored corn balls? In 2025? Dudebro, flavored corn balls are as yesterdays’ news as speculation about Hilary Clinton’s emails. Mr. Planter tried to bring back their uh iconic I guess Cheese Balls in 2018 and I guess they got a little publicity but that brand immediately disappeared down the dusty archive oubliette in a hot minute - I think I only ever saw them at the discount grocery, and never at a regular store. I dug into this a little, sir, and I gotta say, Mr. Utz’s Cheez Balls are the only product in the top 10 of the extruded puffed snacks category on Amazon, and they don’t even crack the top thousand in grocery. If ball-shaped extruded corn were the star you wanted to hitch your wagon to, sir, you have picked the brown dwarf of the brand constellation.
It’s obvious, sir, that you saw the current inexplicable trend of late-thirties millennials starting pickleball leagues as the dawning of their incipient midlife crisis and said, well, I don’t sell red sports cars or clones of their wives twenty years ago, but I bet I can separate some fools from their money by hopping on this fortuitous bandwagon. I can’t imagine that this was actually an astute business move – the only person I know for sure who seriously hopped on this particular trend is the most used-car salesman-adjacent person I know (though I’m sure there are others and I will hear about it), it certainly doesn’t seem to be some sort of mass movement that would truly fund anything other than a one-time emergency payment you need to make. I’ll admit, I could be wrong, maybe it’s a bigger deal than I know and pickleball airs on ESPN3 at 2:30 Eastern on Tuesdays between Barely Masked Homoerotic Beach Volleyball and Trick Chip’n’Putt but I kinda doubt it – I’m pretty sure these branded snacks are gonna be off the grocery shelves before the bag I bought expires on October 25th of this year.
Because here’s the thing, sir – I can’t really figure out who these are for. The pickleball trend in general is obvious nostalgia – and a side note here, I’m personally disappointed that these adults-playing-elementary-school-gym-games trends never include the return of crab soccer, maybe I should talk to Mr. Old Bay about trying to bring that game back as a nostalgia cash grab – but the corn ball nostalgia train has already been fully taken to the station by the return and subsequent disappearance of Mr. Planter’s Cheese Balls, there’s nothing left in that placer for you to mine out. The people who play pickleball don’t seem to me to be the kind of person who would want to eat these. I can’t really say why, it’s a vibes thing, but the pickleball vibeset vs the Pickle Ball vibeset seem incredibly mismatched to me.
The closest I can get to explaining the vibe is that pickleball (the game) fits into that weird classy-trashy niche that frappuccinos, Milano cookies, and girldinner fall into, and the people I know who like those things would not be the type to pick up these abominations of an extruded corn product on a whim. When I imagine the person who would buy this product, I imagine a middle-aged man with a spare tire around his gut, wearing mirrored Ray-Bans and dad sandals, whose conversational topics are restricted entirely to football, his daughter sassing him, and about how he liked Rage Against The Machine before they got political. That’s right, Mr. Vlasic – the only person I can imagine buying this product is Paul Ryan.
Because that’s the main thing, sir – these dill pickle corn balls suck. They’re just awful. When I opened the package I felt like I was opening the reaction chamber of Three Mile Island and was being blasted with a wave of industrial process leftovers that were also somewhat reminiscent of getting sweet-tarts at the AMC 8, but only after the Cineplex 16 opened down the road and the only movie the AMC 8 was showing was Pauly Shore’s Son-In-Law and the only reasons to go there were to make out with a girl with over-hair-sprayed bangs and/or buy a small bag of overpriced Mexican schwag that turned out to be half oregano if you were lucky. They smell like the fence behind Chester Cheeto’s mom’s pool after a benzedrine-fueled four-day rager. They smell just rank and extremely unappetizing.
Of course I tried them anyway, because I’d already bought them – this is for science and the historical record, after all – so I popped a couple in my mouth, and… Sir, have you seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? You know how the Nazi who drinks from the wrong Holy Grail in the faux-Petra temple shrivels down to a husky mummy wrapped around desiccated bones and then explodes? That’s what my tongue felt like to start, because there is so much salt on these corn balls that… I don’t even know, man. These are so salty. You could probably crush these up and use them to make the world’s worst salo and not have to worry too much about botulism. They’ve got so much MSG going in them that if I handed them to a Haight-Asbury hippie in 1973 he’d start a successful campaign against your company that would eventually lead to even jars of your competitors’ pickles clear across the country in New Jersey proudly printing “No MSG!” on their labels forty years later.
Listen, sir, you might think I’m harping on the salt thing here, but we gotta talk about it some more. I have, literally, the highest salt tolerance of anyone I know. I’m not bragging here, it’s a massive flaw in my character that I’ve had to come to accept. It’s gotta be something genetic because I also get dehydrated faster than anyone I know, but regardless, the idea of something being too salty for me was actually pretty shocking. So I looked at the nutrition facts on the bag and these snacks of yours are quite literally one percent sodium by weight. I’m actually kind of shocked that when you look into the bag, that they’re green, and aren’t flecked with bits of silvery metal that explode when they hit your tongue. I went down to my snacks cupboard and did some back of the napkin math and the closest snack in terms of sodium by weight is some chips and they’re literally half what these corn puffs are. I don’t know what the heck y’all were thinking but I’m actually impressed [derogatory].
Once the massive wave of salt passed, and I drank a quart of water, I noticed the next thing about these pickle balls – they are so acidic they etched the enamel of my front teeth into a pattern that I thought was mysterious and mystical until I looked in a mirror and suddenly my pearly-whites read MT. OLIVE SUCKS when I smiled. I don’t know what these things are supposed to taste like but they’ve got so much citric acid going on that you could pour them into a tank of water and use the resultant solution to passivate a CyberTruck. You’d have to be careful if you did that, though, because if you tried to dispose of the solution without bringing in a remediation crew and any of it got into your groundwater, the resultant disaster would probably be on par with one of those mine overflow disasters that turns formerly pleasant rivers orange.
I have to applaud you, I guess, sir, because you have made a product that is so bad that it made me question whether I liked pickles in general or not after eating less than ten extruded corn puffs. I actually had to stand up and go to my fridge and see if I had a pickle to eat after trying these so I could see if I actually liked pickles. This product is bleak.
I’m sorry, sir, I see that in my anger around describing these abominations that I have gotten up to pace around the room, let me just Riker-straddle over this chair and… there we are, sir. Listen, I’m worried about you. You’ve obviously got a problem going on, and I’d like to help you fix it. This isn’t a snack food product, this is a cry for help. You can trust me – tell me what’s going on, and let’s see if we can’t find a better solution to it together.
No? Well, that’s okay, then. It is. I’ll bid you a fond adieu, and I hope that whatever’s going on in your life, that this attempt to set your storied brand on fire either brings you enough money that it’s worth it, or, in what I’m sure is the more likely outcome, goes mostly unnoticed by consumers, and that the recipe is quickly tossed into the dustbin of the oubliette-archive.
Sincerely,
Alex Parise
