What are hot fries and why does only Andy Capp sell them?
asking & answering the important questions
Special thanks to Jeff Slater, a former employee of Andy Capp’s parent company Goodmark. He helped me get the scoop on the Andy Capp story. He also writes Marketing Sage, a blog you should check out.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Andy Capp’s Hot Fries. A staple of 90s American childhoods, Hot Fries seemed to be available at cafeteria vending machines, gas stations, and nowhere else. A choice item to be sure, but not a regularly available victual. Has anyone ever kept a big bag of hot fries next to the Doritos? Andy Capp’s are an elusive treat, a speciality alimentation like Dippin Dots (focused on sports & amusement parks) or Brach’s Sweethearts (targeting sexually active youth). They’re branded differently too. You won’t find Andy Capp on TV or billboards. Andy Capp is nothing like Chester Cheetah with his James Dean swag tempting you to naughtiness like the serpent of Eden. Nor is he the Kool-Aid man, self-promotional to the point of demolition. Andy Capp’s is none of these things, but he does have a story to tell, one that I spent the last 72 waking hours of my life collecting. This post is for Andy Capp’s fans, by an Andy Capp’s fan.
What are hot fries anyways?
In the late 1970 General Mills acquired the Slim Jim brand and created a subsidiary called Goodmark Foods to house it. Slim Jim had been a successful but sleepy business - a mono-product company that never branched out the way General Mills did with its >100 brands. Goodmark Foods, by contrast, would be run by ambitious General Mills executives. Almost immediately Goodmark began developing new snack brands. These new products would of course be grain-based.
Grain was the obvious choice for a new food product because it was so cheap it was practically free. After the Great Depression US Food Policy focused on abundance. Americans could never go hungry again if food was cheap as, and available as, dirt. Agricultural producers were subsidized and incentivized to make huge quantities of staple crops like corn and soybean. The result was that, by the 1970s, corn was literally cheaper than water.
Abundant grain was a new resource and American industry set about trying to use it for everything. Ethanol for fuel. High Fructose Corn Syrup for sugar. Corn flour for baking. Livestock feed, bioplastics, vitamins, fabrics, alcohol, packaging material, grain was used for everything. In Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollen comments what that has meant for grocery stores:
Supermarkets look like they contain a huge variety of food. The shelves are stuffed with thousands of different items. There are dozens of different soups and salad dressings, cases stuffed with frozen dinners and ice cream and meat. The range of food choices is amazing. Yet if you look a little closer, you begin to discover: it’s all corn.
One of the biggest technological successes was a series of chimeric food manufacturing techniques that morphed simple grains into a rainbow of shapes, flavors, and colors.
One such technique was extrusion, where big machines would press and squeeze grains into all sorts of new textures:
These techniques unleashed a wave of food innovation that produced many shelf-stable snacks still popular today. Cheetos, Cheese Balls, Pringles, Chex Mix, Goldfish, Wheat Thins, and hundreds of others pretzel, chip, popcorn, and puffed rice brands were released during this time. They were cheap, delicious, and looked new and fresh. As for the health consequences, people hadn’t even figured out cigarettes were bad, who would question grain-based snacks? It was a golden age for junk food.
In 1971, in the heat of the junk food revolution, Goodmark rolled out Andy Capp Hot Fries. Hot fries were supposed to be a new category, like potato chips. The idea was to make a shelf-stable version of french fries. For whatever reason the category never really took off. Andy Capp’s became what’s called a proprietary eponym, where the brand is synonymous with the category, like Band-Aids or Kleenex.
Who is Andy Capp and why does he sell hot fries?
Andy Capp is a British comic strip character who has been a fixture in the Daily Mirror since 1957. He was a middle-aged degenerate and, were he still relevant, he would certainly be canceled today.
As to why Andy Capp’s image headlines an American snack food brand, there is no readily available explanation. The British comics were syndicated in US newspapers and may have had some recognition among an audience. It’s possible Goodmark underwent a rigorous Q-scoring process to determine the optimal celebrity endorser for their customer. Maybe they considered Fonzi’s Hot Fries. Probably not. Regardless, Goodmark licensed the Andy Capp image and initially included Andy Capp comics on the bag.
Why were Andy Capp’s only available in gas stations and vending machines?
I asked this question to Jeff Slater, a food entrepreneur who sold is business to Goodmark in the 1980s and worked there as an executive. In the 1970s the typical path for a successful food product was through the grocery stores. This was pre-internet and before other formats like convenience stores started selling lots of food. If you want to sell a food product, you have to be where food gets bought. The problem is, and always has been, that competition to break into retailer shelves is stiff. For any given product, say like maple syrup, retailers have a few square feet of space and hundreds of brands to choose from. Big food companies like Nestle or Unilever have a huge edge here because they have fat marketing budgets and established brands. Grocery stores are competing against other grocery stores and will gravitate to the products they know will sell.
At the time of Andy Capp’s launch Goodmark was still a small company with just one brand (Slim Jim’s) and they lacked the cache of bigger peers (apparently parent General Mills wasn’t providing that). Convincing a grocery store to cut shelf space from Pepsi (owner of Frito’s, Lay’s, Cheeto’s and others) in order to make room for a new, unproven product with a dipsomaniacal Brit on the package would be an uphill battle. Goodmark’s solution was to work around the food retailers. Specifically they identified local gas stations and vending machine networks as ways to get in front of consumers without having to compete against major snack companies. These channels were too small for big brands to spend a ton of attention on, but big enough to get Andy Capp’s started. The strategy worked, and that’s why, at least for the first few decades of its existence, Andy Capp’s seemed to be never in normal food places (like grocery stores) but always in less conventional ones like vending machines.
Where are they now?
In 1998 Goodmark was acquired by Conagra, a food behemoth known for brands like Healthy Choice, Orville Redenbacher, and Hunt’s tomato products. With the big guns of Conagra, Goodmark was able to scale the Andy Capp enterprise in a more traditional way - entering major grocery stores and convenience chains. Andy Capp’s now comes in seven flavors, including beer battered onion rings.