Stuff You Probably Don’t Remember Eating: Hippo Toasties
It's 2009.
Castle, Modern Family and Lie To Me are on TV.
Katrina Kaif is at her peak.
Mr. Narendra Modi joins Twitter.
You’re browsing through the shelves of Big Bazaar (Nature’s Basket for poor people). You see a brightly coloured processed packet of crisps in the snacks aisle.
If you’re a glutton, you would notice that this packet was bigger than popular brands like Lay’s, Kurkure and Uncle Chipps.
There it was — Hippo, a toasted wheat-based snack.
Flash forward to a year later, you see this ad on your expensive new LCD TV.
The premise is simple. An anthropomorphic hippopotamus travels around the world, solving global problems like slavery, child labour, and war (apparently, the UN is a joke).
How does he do that?
With a single bag of Hippo Toasties.
Why? Because hunger brings out the worst in mankind.
Try remaking this ad now, and you’ll probably receive the same outrage that Pepsi received last year.
This outrageous commercial worked. Parle Agro’s alternative to salty snacks was a massive success. It was a relief for the people who were bored out of their minds with the standard Red, Green and Blue Lay’s flavours.
Hippo had a wide variety of ‘world’ flavours that made it as attractive as Katrina Kaif in 2009.
Some of these included Pizza (Italy), Manchurian (China), Hot-n-Sweet Tomato (Spain), Thai Chilli (Thailand), Cheese and Jalapeno (Mexico). This was around 8 years before Too Yumm! emulated some of these flavours.
Were they good?
It was so good that its stock ran out, constantly.
However, Hippo’s branding was inconsistent. It claimed to be a healthy snack because it was ‘toasted’. But they had a fat hippo as its mascot? Come on guys, a monkey would have worked better.
Besides the claim, they didn’t try that hard to position themselves as a healthy food brand. One reason behind this could be that its competitors (Lay’s Baked for example) didn’t seem to be doing good in the snacks market.
All this didn’t matter as much — people liked it for its taste, not its personality. It continued to be a hit in the supermarket. Hippo’s stock kept on fluctuating until it stopped.
Hippo ceased to exist.
If you want to pinpoint the exact time Hippo died, you can visit their Twitter post dated 12th May 2014.
This was tragic news for the snack fanatics. Some fans even created an online petition to bring the tasty toasties back to life.
What was the post-mortem report for the Hippo?
No one knows for sure. There are a bunch of theories floating around on the internet which I will discuss later.
But is it dead for certain?
With the rise of alternative snacks like Snackible, Too Yumm! and Bingo (it’s not dead yet) — Hippo’s rebirth may not have much of an impact on the market.
Hippo may have created thousands of memorable moments, but just like every other product, Hippo had an expiration date.
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