Oreos: Encouraging Children to Play With Their Food Since 1912

“What’s the deal with Oreos?  More like WHORE-eos, amiright?  This guy knows what I’m talking about!”

~Booo, you suck, get off the stage!

Recently, an American desert institution celebrated 100 years of tricking kids into drinking milk while making it easier for The Mighty Ducks to throw around racial jokes that have aged pretty poorly.  Yes, soggy Oreos have been shoved down eager American gullets and made here in the grand U S of A since 1912.  And what better way to celebrate this centennial with a good old fashioned fun fact about everyone’s cookie product (behind Girl Scout Cookie Thin Mints and Samoas ), the Oreo.

Oreos: Encouraging Children to Play With Their Food Since 1912

Oreos were far from the first popular items to be made by Nabisco (created after several baking companies merged to create the “National Biscuit Company”)—Barnum’s Animal cookies had been hitting the shelves since 1902.  And in fact, Oreos weren’t even the first “chocolate wafers with cream filling” product to hit the market—they were trying to imitate Hydrox cookies, which had been around since 1908.  When they were first developed and produced at Nabisco’s Chelsea factory in New York City, they were sold for 25 cents a pound, proving that when your grandparents bragged about how cheap things were in their childhood, they weren’t talking out of their ass.

But of course, we know Oreos not for their storied history, but for their chocolaty-creamy-milk-soaking goodness.  While the standard Oreo has remained largely the same through all the years, they have occasionally done some tinkering to the cookie product.  In the 1920’s, they offered Oreos with a lemon flavored cream, which either sounds delicious or disgusting (our staff can’t decide, and our attempts to thaw out the man we’ve had cryogenically frozen since the 1920’s ended in a fairly Frankenstein’s-Monster-like disaster).  Since then, Oreo has thought outside the box by finding every way possible to change their product while pretty much never changing their product.  That’s why the years have given us such important products as:

Double Stuf Oreo (Introduced in 1975)

In a move hailed by most Americans as “What took you so fucking long!?”, Oreo decided to double the amount of their most unhealthy ingredient, and decided to flaunt poor spelling to boot.  They also exist to prove that we’re far cooler than other countries—while the American “Double Stuf” cookies come in peanut butter, original, cool mint, and chocolate cream, while the UK calls them “Double Stuff” and only offers original.  Because, as always, when it comes to food, the Brits have proven themselves to be incredibly boring.  We’re just impressed they managed to avoid replacing the cream with gizzards or something.

Fucking limeys.

Football Oreo (Introduced in 1976)

Remember Football Oreos?  Of course you don’t.  Yeah, you can still occasionally find them, but who really cares about an Oreo shaped like a damn football?  No one does.  This was put out there back when Football was vying to become America’s new favorite sport, and well before it became the millionaire-murdering, concussion-creating, commercial-selling American event that it is today.  We don’t need Oreo’s telling us that football is cool.  And we definitely don’t need Oreos changing their shape to make it harder to twist the two halves off.  This is a cookie eating engineer’s worst nightmare.

Big Stuf Oreo (Introduced in 1984)

These were discontinued in 1991, and we can’t really figure out why.  They were giant Oreos that had over 300 calories and 13 grams of fat.  That’s not much healthier than a McDouble!  This is a gloriously American invention.  The only reason why can think of why it didn’t take over the market was that it was probably too big to fit into most glasses of milk.  Which is a damn shame, because, damn.  A hamburger worth of dessert calories.  That sounds so delicious.  You dropped the ball on this one, America.

Triple Stuf Oreo (Introduced in 2006) followed by the Triple Double Oreo (Introduced in 2011)

In 2006, Oreo released a Triple Stuf Oreo in such a half-assed fashion (one month trials in certain cities before being discontinued indefinitely) that we can’t even find pictures of it online.  It’s like the bigfoot of food products you would want to trick your diabetic enemies to eat.  But apparently either Oreos decided we didn’t deserve three layers of sugary goodness, or they felt we weren’t ready until affotd.com officially appeared on the internet, because they decided to instead go with the Triple Double Oreo, which takes three chocolate wafers, and combine them with a vanilla and a chocolate layer.

While some people on the internet got weirdly and profanely upset about this development, most of us celebrated it as the easiest way to do your best impression of Sammy Jankis’ wife without mainlining liquid sugar into your veins like a pixie stick junkie.  While it’s not exactly a perfection of the Oreo (because how can you improve upon the original) it at least reminded us that, even at 100 years of age, Oreos are still looking for ways to force us into our Rascal scooters, like true goddamn Americans.  And for that, Oreos, we salute you.