Oreos not just plain vanilla anymore
Someone once said: If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. That person does not work for Oreo.
Oreo makes a lot of cookies — 40 billion in 18 countries each year — enough to make it the world’s best-selling cookie. Most of them are the familiar sandwich that’s over 100 years old: white cream nestled between two chocolate wafers. But the company has increasingly been experimenting with limited-edition flavors that seemed designed as much for Instagram as to be eaten.
“Everyone loves the classic Oreo,” said Madeline Vincent, a brand manager for Oreo. “We don’t mess with that.”
But outside that classic Oreo? Oh, there is much messing about. This year, the company released limited-edition flavors like Jelly Donut, Mississippi Mud Pie and Firework. They joined a packed shelf that has recently included flavors like Cookie Dough, Birthday Cake, Mint, S’Mores and Red Velvet, which proved so popular as a limited edition that the company upgraded it to everyday flavor status.
The limited-edition flavors are scarce by design, appearing on shelves for eight to 10 weeks. Some are available only in certain markets or certain stores; Mississippi Mud Pie, for example, was specific to Dollar General stores, which have their headquarters in the South.
The scarcity is not to torture you, Vincent said, but is because Oreo thinks a flavor might be better received in one area than another.
“We consider a variety of factors to determine the right flavors for the right markets and partners, such as customer feedback and consumer preference,” Vincent said, adding that there is no template for which flavor goes to which retailer. “It is decided on a case-bycase basis.”
But there are certain flavors that even fewer people will get to try: those that result from a social media contest that will earn one Oreo fan $500,000. The company is using the hashtag #MyOreoCreation to collect suggested flavors. The top flavors, as determined by Oreo, will be available nationwide next year for the public to vote on.
And here’s where things get, comparatively, weird. Some contenders so far have included English Breakfast Tea (it tastes like tea), Peach Melba (has the flavor of a gummi peach), Mermaid (a sort of lime cream), and at least three doughnut-adjacent flavors to complement the Jelly Donut already in mass production: Raspberry Danish, Coffee and Doughnut, and Beignet. These flavors aren’t available for consumers to buy, but the company has made small batches of them and sent them out into the world.
(The winning flavor may return for a limitededition run or even as a permanent flavor, but that will be up to Oreo.)
Darren Seifer, an industry analyst at the NPD Group, a market research company, said companies need to be cautious when offering consumers a product that’s too similar to the original.
“Any time you have a line extension, your main concern should be whether or not it’s going to be cannibalizing your mainline product,” he said.
Oreo’s social media push, he added, could be interpreted as an effort to save on market research funds — which other companies certainly have done, he said.
“Instead of going and spending lots of money on focus groups and taste testing, they’re almost using the power of social media to help them out figure out what’s the next road and what’s the next big thing,” he said.
But not everyone is thrilled. One flavor, Watermelon, was widely seen as a flop when it was released in 2013. A food industry expert told U.S. News & World Report that the cookie left an unpleasant aftertaste and only vaguely tasted like watermelon.
In a 2016 post on the Ringer, after Oreo came out with a Swedish Fish flavor, Justin Charity argued that the company had gone too far.
In an interview, Charity — who said he was conditioned to love Oreos because his schools were near a Nabisco factory — doubled down on his perspective. “I feel like, ‘Why is Nabisco trying to overwhelm you with meaningless choices?’ ”