The echo of the flushing toilet bowl that was The Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eighteen is still ringing wetly in my ears, but there’s a New Year and another bowl in front of me, right here in the Twenty-Hey-Nineteen, giving me the strength to soldier on. It’s the Limited Edition Helluva Good ® Dip FootBowl!
You’re probably not going to get far in the Food Industry naming something after a foot, but in this case it’s a festive and fun-shaped container of the gloopily delicious French Onion dip that Helluva Good® regularly provides in Your Grocer’s Dairy Case, and this novel container is a stupid idea and it’s a great idea, to pack some of this goop into a football-shaped object.
I’ll spare you the unboxing video, but when I removed the FootBowl from its protective cardboard hangar, I was immediately disappointed by the lack of football-stripes and appearance of the “laces” on the “football,” because they do not match the image printed on the package. The package lied!
The size of the package—understandably, to any experienced snack-grazer—does not reflect the quantity of Helluva Good!® Dip. The top half of the FootBowl is filled with air, like an actual football, so the “wow factor” of this item is that the upper demi-FootBowl, separate from the sealed lower dip-containing section, is to be removed and inverted, for a snacktime-points conversion into an entertaining receptacle for a portion of potato chips.
However, another disappointment on the “Just add chips!” package is the SERVING SUGGESTION showing a heaping demi-FootBowl full of dip along with the complimentary receptacle containing a portion of potato chips. It’s not that the SERVING SUGGESTION is inaccurate, it’s more about the Snack Reality of the amount of chips you can get into the FootBowl. That’s about a handful of chips there, which is maybe 20 percent of the bag of “Party Size!” RUFFLES® obtained for testing and face-putting-into purposes. The solution, obviously, is a larger FootBowl, let’s call it a FootSUPERBowl, and let the copyright-infringement lawsuits commence!
Sidebar about the RUFFLES® though: Look at the size of this single RUFFLE! Now THAT’S a party! Some people prize the folded-over chip, but my fave is the sofa-sized chip.
Getting back to the chip-capacity of the FootBall, it’s almost a conspiracy by Big Dip, to have so few chips and this much dip, because anybody into serious chip-and-dipping subconsciously performs a mental calculation with respect to the ratio of dip to the chips they are deploying to retrieve dip, and this low chip-to-dip ratio finds you loading chips disproportionately. Seriously, this many chips, you might as well just jam ’em all into the dip and eat the whole thing with a spoon, and I realize that’s probably not a new thought.
You learn all kinds of things when you read product packaging, and what I learned was my Limited Edition Helluva Good® dip was produced with GENETIC ENGINEERING. I’m eating The Future!
Another sidebar: In my snack-shopping experience, RUFFLES are NEVER on sale, that’s how perfectly Niche Market they are. You can find lots of other wavy and ridged potato-based dip-delivery devices for around half the price of a typical big bag of the RUFFLES, which in this case set me back a little over five bucks.
Speaking of price, the Limited Edition Helluva Good® Dip FootBowl featuring their French Onion dip, listed net weight of 12 oz. (somewhat less-than-prominently displayed on the downwardly-angled lower half of the front of the package) was $2.99 at my local supermarket, which is a lot more than the $1.49 I could have paid for a regular 12 oz. tub of Helluva French onion-glop, but they correctly identified a market segment of Rube Who Goes for Packaging, or maybe just as a Rube Who Thinks They’re Going to Get Lots of Re-use Out of a Novelty Receptacle/Serving Bowl.
My tidy Bride asked me what I was gonna do with the FootBowl once I was done licking out the remaining dip, and because it is a solid conversation and goofing-on piece, I will be reloading it, but with both hemispheres full of economy-sized purchases of dip. My chips will be in a proper chip receptacle as I deploy the FootBowl through the remainder of the Football-inspired communal eating season. I am not going to keep the Limited Edition Helluva Good® Dip FootBowl; after Super Bowl LIII concludes, I will punt it into the American Plastic Stream.
