Cheese explosion virus
When a food product company has to choose a name for a new product, what kind of process do they go through, I wonder? I’m sure the lengthy decision-making system is influenced by market trends and buying patterns etc playing on what kind of sounds people respond to and what triggers that vital spark of consumer interest in their advertising campaigns (”if you liked Choco Pops, you are going to SHIT PURE JOY over Choco Chops! All the goodness of pork with the creamy taste of chocolate!”).
Alternatively, a simple function employed by businesses for creating the names of children-oriented food products is to take some kind of rudimentary onomatopoeic word and tack it onto the rough food group that the product belongs to. Here are some examples that I thought up in my brain:
Whizz Chips
Bang Bang Ketchup
Crazy Spasm Jelly
High Pitched Knee In Bollocks Squeal Pastilles
Shouts For Help Muffled By Pillow Vol Au Vent Cases
Gutteral Orgasm Mixed Juice
Vaginal Fart Fairy Bakewells
And so on in that fashion.
In Japan however, the function for choosing product names is quite different. Here, many companies seem to employ a tactic of picking the 2 most opposing and/or meaningless-in-their-combination words they can find, shoving them together, sitting back and cracking open a can of “Golden Stream” beer in celebration and calling the wife and telling her to go to bed early because you’re going to have a big wank when you get home.
This is exactly how products like “Dairy Sour” get put on the market. Almost with a kind of brilliant, logic-defying precision, the creators of this product have chosen one word and have somehow managed to choose a second word out of literally hundreds of thousands in the English language, that completely negates the point of the first. Am I the only one to whom, the word “sour” when coupled with “dairy” instantly conjures up an image of rotten, fetid milk, the kind that you keep in your room at university because your crap student housing doesn’t have a fridge and the solid parts have all curdled and separated from the murky, “milk water” which floats at the top, making you dry heave when you imagine touching the cheese-gas-expanded carton and the volatile liquid erupts out and explodes all over your face, eating away at your skin like that virus in The Rock? THAT is dairy sour.
I can fully appreciate that in a very crude sense the pedigree of the product has been conveyed however, that being it is a dairy-based product that tastes a bit sour but surely there could be some better combination of words to do the same that wouldn’t simultaneously make me sheepishly put this product back on the shelf after having a flashback about university dry heave virus milk?
Appearance
Dairy Sour comes in 2 varieties, pale green and pale yellow. The green flavour was “melon” but I chose the far more ambiguous-sounding “fruit” flavour, which proudly proclaims it’s 1% fruit content near the bottom of the bottle. It is a liquid, rather than some kind of viscous yoghurt-like drink and also has the world’s most difficult to read colour scheme, what with it’s hysterically stupid choice of white text, which is completely camouflaged by the pale milky colours of the liquid inside. 2/5
Taste/Smell I was expecting something terrible. Something sour and maybe with chewy curdled nuggets in it. But no! What a goddamn let down. The company behind Dairy Sour really need to have a rethink about the name they have given this product what with it being neither dairy-like nor sour in any way whatsoever. Not that the average Japanese person really makes a discernible connection with the English meaning when they see the words “Dairy Sour” anyway. Most of them probably just think “ooh Dairy Sour, sounds like happy!” and buy 20 bottles in one go.
It’s sort of juice-like, with a kind of banana-ish taste and really not all that unpleasant. I guess on some level the taste could be construed as being “sour”, and would probably explode the minds of some sheltered, remote pygmy tribe deep in the Amazon rain forest whose taste-buds have never experienced anything other than guano sandwiches before, but to Taste Tester Extraordinaire Big Cock McGeeâ„¢ (that’s me), the flavour is very tame. Nice, even. 3/5
Fear Factor Given my irrational fear of cheese, quite substantial. There are drinks on the market that are cheesecake flavoured and I had the idea in my head that some kind of sour, milk-based product could be a whole lot worse. But I was wrong. 2/5
Health Implications Contains the special shit-cleaning bacteria that all “healthy” drinks are on the bandwagon of nowadays, so this drink is fairly good for you. And don’t forget about the 1% Real Fruit. 3/5
Final Rating 3/5
cheesecake-flavoured drinks! now that’s a good idea. do they have oreo cheesecake-flavoured ones?
No. There are oreo cheesecakes now? I imagine a huge fat lady watching trashy soap operas with a bag of hundreds of miniature cheesecakes licking off the cheese and stacking the leftover, tiny crusts in a succulent pile - but I assume you mean cheesecakes made with oreo bits in them.
“Sour” is a Japanese code word for “carbonated.”
Whilst that is often true for cocktails, this drink wasn’t carbonated in any way - entirely flat.
Hey, you’re getting faster and faster. Keep up the fast publishing. Or get even faster, if you like.
>When a food product company has to choose a name for a new product, what kind of process do they go through, I wonder?
You might think about a complicated process involving graphics and tables and formulas calculated by state-of-the-art computer systems. And about meetings, where people in black suits sit on heavy desks and discuss the “yes” and “maybe” and “no” of various options. Or maybe you think of creative youngsters, surfin’ on the waves of the yet unknown trends of tomorrows marketing world, saying things like “you definetely dodee” and “oooteeny”.
It’s all wrong. Most names of food products in japan are invented by a small fourty-year-old man. He wears a blue plastic robe, made of a german trashbag. His friends call him “seafood larry overlord”. On every third of the seventh he writes down all the names of the coming years food products and then falls into stasis for eleven months.
You asked. And now you know the disturbing truth.
question: are html tags allowed in the comments?
i’ll give it a try: bold, italic, underlined…
okay.
Kailoi > was “oooteeny” a Star Wars reference? If so, give me a medal.
yongfook: medal.
‘nother checking of possiblities: hyperlink
Scorpk
Would like to plug in some graphics here. possible is?
haven’t you had an oreo cheesecake before? it’s just a cheesecake with a base made out of crushed oreo biscuits.
as someone who doesn’t like cheese, cheesecake is unsurprisingly off-limits for me. The very idea of cheesecake makes me gag.
OT: I have to admit that the new layout is the cleanest that I’ve seen ya do so far! Well done!
but, cheesecake (or at least some versions of it) doesn’t actually really taste like cheese. maybe it’s your fear of smegma that’s preventing you from experiencing the true joys of such pastries.
Tru dat. Cheesecake’s usually more sweet ‘n’ tangy than the cheesey. Yup yup.
Not that that makes cheese any less awesome, which it is.
Now this is the best product review I have read so far. But I have a suggestion…it seems you have a great talent of saying serius stuff in a funny way and really you should think about a careen as a stand up comedian! You have a permanent fan here! Awesome!!
Kalloi commented thusly: “On every third of the seventh he writes down all the names of the coming years food products and then falls into stasis for eleven months.”
That is actually the way Pfizer names its drugs - they have a big list of cool sounding names and picks them off, one by one. In another world, you could be giving kids Viagra syrup to relieve pain from illness, and there’d be a huge problem with spam trying to sell you Ge.ner1c Calpo1.
for half a second i was tempted to add a viagra-joke. hope you admire me for not doing this. in this capitalism-driven, product-overfloating world there are obviously only few sensemaking names for new product-creations left. it’s a game left to people like seafood larry overlord and a network of electronic brains, juggling letters into a pronouncable row. soon we’ll buy goulfart-deodorant and rottenrat-beer with the addition sorry, no other name for this brand was left in the datebase on the package. funny world, sad world.
do you think it was supposed to be ‘daily’ but in that lovable engrish fashion, got misspelled? just a thought…
because Daily Sour makes a lot more sense.
I’m glad to hear the stuff tastes good. I thought natto looked like chilled baked beans with semen mixed in. This stuff looks like…they bottled it instead of mixing it into the baked beans.
I like cheese eddy.
hi I LIKE A LOT OF CHEEESE
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OMFG! Great packaging! Great name! Marketing geniouses at work!
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