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Monday, December 19, 2005

CULTURE: The Fall of Golden Wonder



As a child I liked two kinds of crisp: all the crisps I'd eaten and all the crisps I was yet to eat.

Please don't think this food is entirely food related (although it is at the moment), I'm not a net version of Nigel 'A funeral simply must have vol-au-vont' Slater (his turn's coming though).

The fall of Golden Wonder isn't merely a perfect modern rendering of the fall of Rome, it tells all about us.

As I was saying, I loved crisps as a child. I didn't get nearly enough crisps as child, or 'cwips' as I called them when very young and button-cute, and rarely reached the nirvana of meeting all my basic food needs at once: Coke, crisps and a bar of chocolate. Man-alive I was happy if I got all three. It caused a bit of juggling: you had to hold the Coke between your bare knees and tip the crisps into your up-tipped mouth, looking like you're doing an impression of a wolf.

These items were important. The Coke might sometimes be a can of R White's, or a Tango, but - other than a brief obsession with Quatro (was it called that? That was better than Blade Runner!) - I most times went for Coke. Ice-cold Coke, lovely ice-cold, headache inducing, Coke. You took your life in your hands didn't you? Sometimes you had a mini-stroke, other times the Coke would cause instant heartburn. The worst thing was getting the shit coming out of your nose and making your eyes water. To think I spent my Mum and Dad's money on tooth-rot.

Chocolate? Twix. It had to be. The two fingers offered four things to eat, the caramel and biscuit on each. Drifters were in their infancy then, and I remain, as I was then, sceptical of the merits of that confection. I quite liked the odd Banjo, but felt the toasted coconut version to be a touch adult. Other bars had little chance, especially the fancy-Dan Topic, which was only attractive because of it's pricey-ness. A Bounty might creep in, but not if I'd bought a Lilt: that's too tropical. Fuck, I am Nigel Slater.

Anyway, the crisps I'd choose would be Golden Wonder.

It was an orderly world then. Crisps came in pretty standard flavours; Ready Salted (the meaning of which escaped me for years), Cheese and Onion, Salt and Vinegar, Beef and variations (e.g. Beef and Onion, much missed), Chicken, normally Roast, Prawn Cocktail, Sausage and Tomato, and something bacon-based.

This is a good description of Golden Wonders range at the time. They also did bigger bags, which looked identically to the smaller bags so allowing you to pretend that you have shrunk, but that was it, in the Crisp range.

They did other things. I may be the last person to remember the Rock and Rollers advert and the lyrics of the song, (save for the composer perhaps, who sat back in the summer of 1970-something and waited for the royalty cheques to come a-rolling on in. Until the autumn of 1970-something, when Golden Wonder pulled the plug on the whole sorry venture, and sacked the guy who thought the company needed Glam Rock crisps) and appreciated Wotsits and other light-as-air fuck-all-in-'em snacks, but I never strayed far from crisps and hardly ever away from Golden Wonder.

They were supreme. I only saw other brands in pubs, which was KP-dominated (blimey they punched a cheese-hit right in the hooter) and in supermarkets, which, comically enough I thought, made their own crisps! Every newsagent and off-license, the main satisfier of local crisp need, was stuffed with Golden Wonder. I reckon that 9 out of 10 bags I ate back then (that was a great party) were Golden Wonder.

Which was strange, really, as Golden Wonder were a bit suspect.

First thing: packaging. It wasn't at all rare for the first crisp in your mouth to reveal the ugly truth that the entire bag was stale thanks to a split in the seam. That was a hard bag to get through.

Next: green bits. Golden Wonder was notorious for having plenty of green and uneatable crisps in your pack. You didn't just eat them all, and expect them to all taste nice. You inspected them, made sure they weren't green or that super nut-brown that was really hard eating.

Third: variable flavouring. Golden Wonder must have had a bloke with a shovel chucking heaps of flavouring over skip loads of crisps. Nothing mechanical could have produced the huge variety of flavour Golden Wonder would ascribe to a crisp.

At one end of the vari-flavour system, you had to read the front of the packet to make sure that you had indeed purchased Salt and Vinegar, and that you had not, in the gloom of the shop, confused your blues and bought Fucking Ready Salted instead. At the other end, a heavily flavoured packet of Cheese and Onion was as filling as the sandwich. If you found a really good bag of Golden Wonder, you might go to the same shop for the next pack, like a Guinness-man who's found a good pint, but eventually that supply would run dry, and it'd be back to chomping them nasty green rotters again.

Golden Wonder, like the Roman Empire, dominated the crisp market, like Europe.

And like the Romans, who got so rich they couldn't give a shit, Golden Wonder allowed this empire-of-crisps to be smashed to pieces. Smashed to pieces in exactly the way some people liked to eat crisps back then, by smashing the bag with a fist and pulverising the crisps, so that you could near breathe them in.

Golden Wonder was a big company, but it was out of shape. Golden Wonder knew their Cheese and Onions (if not what thoses things taste like) and knew that there was no crisp-maker of note that could compete with them.
They gave the quality control guy early retirement. They got distracted by Pot Noodle. Who knows?

Walkers came along and fucked them right over, we know that.

How did Walkers smash Golden Wonders empire to Smash? They did something real radical. Real maverick, something straight out of left field. Something, you know, the ad agency thought they might be bold enough to go for. Or maybe it was something two blokes thought up in a pub. Walkers bold moved, designed to snatch hold of the crisp market, was to swap the colours of the Cheese and Onion and Salt and Vinegar.

Now younger readers might be thinking, what, what colour, what you talking about, don't talk shit. Before Walkers, because of rules passed down during the war to allow illiterate soilders to pick crisps appropriately, Cheese and Onion crisps had always come in green bags and Salt and Vinegar came in light blue ( to avoid Fucking Ready Salted, which was dark blue.)

Walkers gave the old rules a right tump, and put Cheese and Onion in blue bags and Salt and Vinegar in green ones. I had to buy a bag to check out the craziness of it. It was as mad as putting milk in Coke cans, and must have caused years of unnecessary 'I asked for Cheese and Onion' heart-ache.

This wasn't they're only strategy. I'm sure the reps would have worked especially hard, probably beyond the job description, to encourage shops to take Walkers alongside Golden Wonders. They had quality control, and every Walker's crisp you had tasted the same, something Golden Wonder couldn't manage in the same bag.

That's why I won't eat Walkers now: they're too predictable. That and the snack-crack MSG and hydrogrenated vegetable oil.

Still, nothing stays the same and GW may rise again. Look here for an insight into the crisp market in Britain and Golden Wonder's plan to take on Walkers.

There's no moral to this story (because I'm the editor, that's why), but I would say: let's just stop eating American crisps. And let's change the name of junk food to shit food.

And for nostagic reasons, let's all eat Golden Wonder and tell Pepsi Co, the owners of Walkers, to fuck right off.

Here's to shit crisps! Here's to the 70's: golden land, green crisps. Here's to headache inducing experiments with melting crisp bags under the grill to make badges. Honestly, them badges were cool.

By the way, have I told you how much I like Jubblies?

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