Why the canned meat that gave rise to the term “spam” breaks sales records
With more than eight decades in the market, the canned meat brand Spam registered record sales in the 2021 for the seventh consecutive year.
The good performance of the company was highlighted by Jim Snee, president of Hormel Foods, the American company that owns the brand, in a press conference for investors, after the publication of the group’s results at the end of the October period.
The product, launched in 1937, became very popular with its customers for being relatively inexpensive and having a long life. During WWII it was distributed by the ton and used to feed both American troops and European civilians from allied nations.
Spam was also highly consumed in the post-conflict years, when many countries were trying to rebuild and food was scarce.
Spam recipes around the world are varied. In the photo, rice with pineapple and Spam.
Over time, this product became synonymous with a cheap ingredient in the West, but was seen as a ¨manjar¨ in the region of Asia-Pacific, which partly explains the success of the brand in recent years.
Spam was brought to Korea South by the US Army during the Korean War in the decade of 1950, as an attempt to address the lack of food during the conflict. However, the product was so absorbed by South Korean culture that it became one of the country’s favorite dishes: the “budae jjigae” or “military stew”.
During the Lunar New Year, it is sold in emporiums and supermarkets as a luxury item, in a special packaging, used by Koreans as a gift.
This canned food also has a huge market in Haw State ai, where it is found on the menu of several restaurants in the archipelago. There it is eaten for breakfast with eggs and rice. Also in other fried rice dishes or as a kind of sushi, the “Spam musubi”.
From the can to emails The product is considered a “delicacy” in some Asian countries.
The popularity it gained after World War II would make it, years later, synonymous with the spam tray.
The reason, according to the etymologist Graeme Donald, the relationship dates back to a sketch by the British comedy group Monty Python from the decade of 1950, in which a couple goes to a restaurant where each item on the menu has Spam as an ingredient. Although the woman makes it clear that she does not like canned food, the assistant repeats in a shrill voice: “Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam …”, a mantra repeated in chorus by a group of Vikings who are also on the scene.
The use of the word as a synonym for annoying and unwanted message began as a joke among Internet users, but quickly became universal, as reported by the American radio station NPR in an interview with Finn Brunton, author from Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (“Spam: a secret history of the Internet”).
The recent success of the brand, now present in more than 80 countries, motivated Hormel Foods to study an expansion of its catalog of family products Spam, which should hit the shelves at 2023, Snee told the investor conference.
Now you can receive notifications from e BBC News World. Download the new version of our app and activate them so as not to miss our best content.
Do you already know our YouTube channel? Subscribe!
