<story><title>The Bacon Boom Was Not an Accident</title><url>http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-06/bacon-why-americas-favorite-food-mania-happened?google_editors_picks=true</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>smacktoward</author><text>What&amp;#x27;s interesting about this story is that it starts out seemingly like it&amp;#x27;s going to be about devious marketers devising a way to turn a product nobody wanted into a hot seller strictly through marketing, in much the same way that clever marketing turned the universally reviled Patagonian toothfish into a big seller by bestowing upon it the more upscale name &amp;quot;Chilean sea bass&amp;quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://priceonomics.com/the-invention-of-the-chilean-sea-bass/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;priceonomics.com&amp;#x2F;the-invention-of-the-chilean-sea-bas...&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;But then you get into the meat of it (sorry) and find that the root of the turnaround is an actual technical accomplishment -- a method to cook and distribute pre-cooked bacon that wouldn&amp;#x27;t rob the bacon of its flavor:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; The early 1990s was a time of great advancements in precooked bacon technology. Pork producers, food labs, and agricultural schools such as Iowa State University began investing substantially in precooked R&amp;amp;D. Hormel and Swift worked on microwaveable precooked slices for home consumers, while Chicago’s OSI and the now-defunct Wilson Foods poured their efforts into bacon spirals that would fit perfectly atop a hamburger.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;These technical innovations turned out to be the key, because the pork marketers were pitching bacon to fast-food chains as a &amp;quot;flavor enhancer,&amp;quot; but the chains that tried it mostly came away dissatisfied: the hassle of adding bacon-cooking to their highly regimented kitchens created expense and added time to the burger-assembly process, while existing methods for pre-cooking bacon yielded a tasteless product. Pre-cooked bacon with taste intact (that came in shapes ready to plop on top of a hamburger patty, no less) took all that friction away.&lt;p&gt;My only regret is that the whole thing is written from the perspective of the Pork Marketing Board, which funded the research into pre-cooking bacon, but doesn&amp;#x27;t really tell you much about the research itself. That seems like it&amp;#x27;d be an interesting story, for those of a technical bent; here&amp;#x27;s a problem, how do you solve it?</text></comment>
<story><title>The Bacon Boom Was Not an Accident</title><url>http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-06/bacon-why-americas-favorite-food-mania-happened?google_editors_picks=true</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>GuiA</author><text>Non US based HNers might be confused; bacon really is a big deal in the US. Restaurants put it in salads, sandwiches, and pretty much anything they can- I&amp;#x27;ve had bacon ice cream once (weirdly it was pretty tasty).&lt;p&gt;Some macho people proudly eat pounds of it, claiming that it is a manly&amp;#x2F;american food- see for example this youtube video: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8u8Z3bUQfs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=m8u8Z3bUQfs&lt;/a&gt; . In stores, you can find as many items with bacon texture on them as you can find items with prints of the US flag. &amp;quot;Bacon bowls&amp;quot; are a thing.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s really more than just a food in the US- people are obsessed with it. If you spend time on reddit, you can get a glimpse of that through the ever recurring bacon posts in the mainstream subreddits.</text></comment>