Commentary

Triscuit Snacks On Empty Inspiration

Get ready to be inspired, everybody. At 7:24 a.m. on Monday morning, I polished off the last of the Halloween candy. It took longer than expected due to a miscalculation on my part: I overestimated my neighborhood’s appetite for York Peppermint Patties by approximately three 175-piece boxes (“towers,” actually, is a more accurate descriptor of the vessel in which they were encased). Kids these days, huh? Next thing you’ll tell me they don’t like Cheers reruns or IRS-era R.E.M., either.

Now that I have soared (and sweated) majestically alongside the eagles, I’ve got a question for the haters who said I’d never make anything of myself: NOW who’s the one with a mid-double-digit BMI? Oh, it gets better. Remember how all those NBA teams wined and dined LeBron James when he was a free agent a few years back? That’s nothing compared to the clinical-trial-participation offers I’m currently fielding from makers of diabetes drugs.

But once you’ve summitted the mountain, friend, there’s nowhere to go but down. Thus I’ve spent the last few days recalibrating my snacking regimen – and somehow, o cursed fate, I happened upon a lonely box of no-fat Triscuits in the process.

As it turns out, while I was busy ramming pepperminty deliciousness into my facehole, the rest of the family was consuming all the other good snacks. Popcorn? No more. Oreos? Forget it. Coarse kosher salt for the fruit and vegetables? Gone the way of the dodo bird.

So here we are. Alright, Triscuits. You don’t like me and I don’t like you. But let’s just do this and I can get back to smothering you with grape jelly.

Sadly, just as Triscuits are uninspiring to gobble, so too are its brand videos to watch. I’m blessed with the ability to locate some basic motivation in just about any scenario - the naked dude shrieking at trees at 3 a.m. quite obviously was rejected by Yale’s graduate program in landscape design, etc. - but for the life of me I can’t figure out what prompted Triscuit’s brand team to re-re-re-re-travel the artisans-R-inspiring path for the second in its series of “Made For More” clips.

Was it hunger? It had to have been hunger.

As I understand it, Triscuits serve two primary collaborative functions. You can pile fingernail-sized food chunklets on them or you can spread any number of viscous substances across their sediment-strafed surface. But Triscuit views its utility through a wider lens, one that spans a kitchen sink’s worth of brand-video clichés. Inspiration! Simplicity! Family! Music!

It’s too much for a humble snackthing to bear. A sentence from the so-precious first installment, “Simple Inspiration with Savannah Bee Company,” tells you all you need to know about the approach. The McConaughey-bro protagonist describes honey bees as “the unsung heroines of the world. You can’t help but be fascinated by them and fall in love with them, because there’s some depth and romance and poetry in the way they live their life. They’re beautiful.” Bees, snack crackers and poetry? I’m busy that afternoon, thanks.

Spreading Simplicity with PB&Jams,” which debuted earlier this week, suffers from that same inflated self-seriousness. The video commences with a few words from a maker of nut butters, which segues into some small talk around the kitchen with the maker’s mom. It then checks in with a random dude in the park who attests to the epicurean genius of pairing these butters with Triscuits (read: “Durrrr! Let’s make sure viewers have no issue drawing the connection on their own! Durrrrrrrr!”) before sharing some generalities about Triscuit accessorizing and… wait, what’s this about music’s role in the company’s evolution, or maybe its name? I have a headache now that demands the consumption of a less texturally byzantine snack cracker.

There’s nothing remotely offensive or regretfully stupid in either video, at least. Triscuit doesn’t try to make a case for its nutritional value, for instance, or attempt to viralify the staid snack-cracker space (“she’s Sgt. Evelyn ‘Trish’ Triscuit! He’s Det. Monterey J. Cheese! Together they’re a mismatched-but-not-really pair of cops whose mystery-solving skills are positively… CRACKERJACK” – okay, fine, I’d watch the crap out of that, as I would a tour of the cafeteria at Triscuit headquarters or maybe some kind of mini-shuffleboard competition in which the cues/sticks are replaced by sporks and the weighted disks are replaced by Triscuits).

See? There’s three middling Triscuit-related ideas for you right there. This isn’t a no-win assignment by any stretch of the imagination. Enough with the deification of artisan/foodie types.

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