Oetker is the best-known German food brand, according to public opinion surveys. The company started with baking powder before turning to the manufacture of custard powder, the product with which it is most closely associated. However, Dr. August Oetker KG has grown into a conglomerate that transcends foodstuff production to rank among Germany’s largest internationally operating family-owned and family-run companies.
It all began in Bielefeld in 1891, when pharmacist August Oetker (1862–1918), a baker’s son, hit upon the idea of selling “Backin” baking powder in small, standardized envelopes, each for 500 grams of flour. Oetker branded the baking powder with a distinctive logo—a silhouette of a woman’s head—and his own name, the title of “doctor” signaling quality. From the start Oetker ran an intense and hugely successful advertising campaign. Backin was patented in 1903, and 50 million envelopes were sold in 1906. From 1908 on, the company’s very modern marketing campaign was managed by a special department at the Oetker factory. In 1911 Oetker published Schulkochbuch, a cookbook for school kitchens, and a baking cookbook appeared in 1930. The company also introduced cooking demonstrations and public tastings, and later pioneered advertising on TV.
However, the postwar economic recovery meant that in the mid-1950s less baking was done at home, and more products were purchased at bakeries. The amount of flour sold diminished by half, whereas the expenditure on prepared baked goods doubled. But housewives still had to demonstrate their skills, and Obsttorte, a prebaked sponge or short pastry base covered with fresh, tinned, or poached fruit and a glaze, became a favorite homemade dessert. It was easy and quick to make and considered tasty and healthy. Oetker compensated for losses in Backin sales by launching a similarly packaged powdered jelly glaze in 1950, which became an instant hit.
Today, Oetker sells a wide range of cake and pudding mixes, and the company’s holdings have diversified into other areas, such as shipping, hotels, banking, sparkling wine production, soft drinks, and breweries, with frozen pizza now the top seller under the Oetker brand. Recently, the family’s political and economic ties to the Nazi regime were revealed.
See also germany.
olfaction, the sense of smell, contributes noticeably to perceptions of sweetness. Sweet is generally considered to be one of the five principal qualities of the sense of taste—or gustation—along with sour, salty, bitter, and umami (umami refers to the savory taste, associated with glutamates, whether naturally occurring or synthetic). Sweet taste sensations arise primarily from the activation of specialized receptors on cells located in taste buds on the tongue. Yet people also perceive sweet notes in certain odors: in the fragrances of flowers and perfumes, and, significantly, in the aromas of foods. Many food aromas seem distinctly sweet—consider, for instance, the sweet scent of a ripe banana. So how does olfaction contribute to the sweet flavors of foods and beverages?
When we chew a morsel of food or sip a beverage, the resulting perception of flavor arises in part from the activation of gustatory receptors in the tongue and oral cavity, but more substantially from the activation of olfactory receptors in the nose (and from the activation, in the oral cavity, of somatosensory receptors, which convey information about texture, pungency, and temperature). When we take food in the mouth, airborne molecules reach olfactory receptors in the nose by an indirect route, traveling retronasally, through the back of the mouth. (When we sniff, the odor-producing molecules reach the olfactory receptors directly, traveling orthonasally, through the nostrils.) The critical role that olfaction plays in the perception of flavor becomes apparent when the sense of smell is taken away or blunted—for instance, when a head cold or allergy blocks our nasal passages, preventing the airborne molecules from reaching olfactory receptors and thereby dampening flavors. In a related vein, the tendency for elderly people to report that, over the years, foods “lose” their flavor largely reflects the substantial decline with age in olfactory sensitivity.
The role of olfaction can be easily demonstrated by filling a small cup with an assortment of different fruit-flavored jelly beans. See jelly beans. Shut your eyes to avoid color cues and, with one hand, pinch your nose closed. Then, with eyes still shut and nose still pinched, pick out one jelly bean, put it in your mouth, and bite into it. As long as your nose remains closed, the jelly bean will have little flavor beyond sourness or sweetness, which comes from gustation, or pungency, which comes from somatosensation. Lacking direct olfactory information or indirect color cues about the flavor, it is difficult to identify the fruit by gustation alone. Unpinching your nose, however, releases a torrent of flavor, making it much easier to identify the fruit—as berry or peach, grape or banana. Further, with nasal passages open, the jelly bean, now full-flavored, may appear notably sweeter.
Odors that are themselves described as sweet can augment or enhance sweet tastes, even though the odors produce no sweetness through the gustatory sense. Adding a few drops of sweet-smelling vanilla to morning coffee, for example, makes the coffee taste sweeter, even though pure vanilla evokes no gustatory sweetness. This can be confirmed by pinching the nostrils to block olfaction while sipping the coffee and then comparing sweetness, now from gustation alone, with and without the added vanilla. See vanilla. Robert Frank and Jennifer Byram showed that adding strawberry odor enhanced the sweetness of a sugary food but adding peanut butter odor did not. On the other hand, adding strawberry odor did not enhance the saltiness of a salty food. Odors enhance taste qualities when the qualities of the odors and tastes are similar. This is not surprising. But what makes odor qualities and taste qualities similar? Why, for example, are certain odors, such as vanilla, perceived as sweet?
Sweet tastes are first and foremost associated with the presence of sugars in foods, and hence with calories—and an adequate intake of calories is critical to health and well-being. Consequently, sweet tastes presumably evolved to be intrinsically pleasurable and rewarding. Although sugars can weakly stimulate the olfactory sense, the rich flavors of milk, fruits, and other foods arise mostly from the large number of odorous molecules that are specific to each food and that give each food its characteristic flavor. To the extent that some of the odorous molecules are associated with the presence of sugars in foods, olfactory receptors that respond to these molecules may have evolved an intrinsic capacity to produce pleasant, rewarding, sweet sensations.
An alternative explanation, however, does exist. When people experience particular odors in close conjunction with particular tastes, the odors may take on the associated taste qualities. In support of this hypothesis, Richard Stevenson, Robert Boakes, and John Prescott showed that after pairing a previously tasteless odor with a sweet taste, the odor itself appeared sweet. In a similar vein, using behavioral training and testing methods, Shree Gautam and Justus Verhagen showed that in rats, as in humans, odors became sweet only after the odors were paired with sugar. And using methods of neuroimaging, Dana Small and her colleagues observed, in regions of the human brain associated with flavor perception (insula, orbitofrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex), especially significant neural responses to mixtures of perceptually similar olfactory and gustatory stimuli, such as vanilla and sugar.
A final observation: experiencing vanilla together with sugar makes vanilla taste sweet like sugar, but it does not make sugar taste like vanilla. In general, taste donates while olfaction receives. This asymmetry doubtless evolved from the natural capacity of sugars, and other sweet-tasting substances, to be pleasurable and rewarding, and of the biological advantage to having a flavor system that can effectively learn which odors are consistently associated with these sweet stimuli. Analogous processes likely mediate the association of other odors with bitter tastes, which often characterize the presence of poisonous substances. The inverse is not true, as there is no equivalent biological basis for taste qualities to signal odors. The brain appears to be so configured that it readily allows one-way transfers of qualities, such as sweetness, from taste to odor.
See also aroma; sweetness preference; and vision.
Orange Julius is a frozen drink made from orange juice, crushed ice, sugar, and a “secret ingredient” that may contain powdered milk or egg whites and vanilla flavoring. The drink was originally sold from Orange Julius stands that became an iconic part of the Southern California landscape and eventually spread nationwide.
The brand was founded in 1926 when real estate broker Willard Hamlin secured a corner storefront in downtown Los Angeles for Julius Fried’s orange juice stand. This was the height of the soda fountain boom, with consumers developing a passion for novelty drinks. See soda fountain. Hamlin decided to invent his own concoction, the Orange Julius, which quickly became the stand’s hottest seller. Hamlin quit real estate and opened counters selling nothing but Orange Julius everywhere from Los Angeles to New York’s Times Square. For an energy boost, customers could have a raw egg cracked into the drink before blending. The brand’s mascot was a red devil who appeared over the tagline: “A Devilish Good Drink.”
The Great Depression curtailed the business, but after World War II Hamlin rode the franchise boom to open stores (many in an eye-catching modernist style) across Southern California’s spreading suburbs and particularly in the new retail malls. He also expanded the offerings to include hot dogs and hamburgers and new Julius flavors like pineapple and strawberry. In 1967 Hamlin sold Orange Julius to International Industries, a franchise specialist that began a national and international expansion of the brand. The company was bought and sold several times before International Dairy Queen purchased the company in 1987. Today, Dairy Queen stores sell eight flavors of “Julius Originals” drinks, including the original orange flavor. Hamlin’s formula remains a closely guarded secret, leading fans to experiment with many different ingredients, including vanilla pudding mix, raw egg whites, and whole milk, to re-create the drink at home.
See also dairy queen.
Oreos, the world’s top-selling cookie, manufactured by the Nabisco Company, are a sandwich biscuit consisting of two crisp chocolate rounds with a vanilla cream filling.
Until the twentieth century, cookies in America were generally homemade or bought at local bakeries; mass-produced cookies like Oreos became popular around the turn of the century due to the relatively inexpensive cost of sugar, the development of new manufacturing technologies, and the rise in popularity of such treats. The National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) introduced the Oreo Biscuit in 1912, the same year they released the Lorna Doone, a square shortbread cookie. Oreos were first sold to grocer S. C. Thuesen in Hoboken, New Jersey, and were launched nationally one month later. What is now referred to as “milk’s favorite cookie” was not the first of its kind, however. Nabisco had previously offered a similar product dubbed “Bouquet,” and the Sunshine Biscuit Company had launched its chocolate sandwich cookie, the Hydrox, in 1908.
The name Oreo was invented by Nabisco, but its origins remain unclear—not even Nabisco cites a definitive story. Some food historians speculate that the name derives from the French word for gold (or), and in fact the cookie’s name was printed in gold lettering on the original package. Others, less convincingly, suggest that the name comes from the Greek oros, meaning “mountain,” whose root is “ore-”—the claim being that these flat cookies were originally shaped into mounds. Although the “Oreo” part of the name has remained the same, the tagline has evolved. In 1921 the Oreo Biscuit became the Oreo Sandwich. Then, in 1948, it was changed to Oreo Crème Sandwich; in 1974 it morphed again into Oreo Chocolate Sandwich, which it remains today.
The Oreo has also undergone evolution in its design. The size of the cookie has fluctuated, with today’s version being slightly smaller than the original, although larger than intermediate renderings. And although the chocolate rounds have always been docked and embossed (cut and stamped), the original bore a wreath of petals said to have been designed by Nabisco employee William Turnier. In 1924 a pair of turtledoves was added to the wreath. The look of today’s Oreo—a series of four-leaf clovers surrounding the word “OREO” set within the Nabisco logo, all surrounded by a dotted line and a ridged outer edge—was created in 1952.
Little is known about the ingredients in the original Oreo recipe. In recent years the type of fat used in both the cookies and the cream has been altered. In the mid-1990s the lard used in the filling was replaced by partially hydrogenated vegetable oil; however, due to rising health concerns about trans fats, the recipe was again changed in 2005 to a blend of canola and palm oils. Oreos received kosher certification in 1998, and modern Oreos are egg- and dairy-free, making them suitable for vegetarians and vegans.
Today, there are over 40 flavors and varieties of Oreo cookies—ranging from Double Stuff, introduced in 1975 and offering additional cream filling; Minis; Golden Oreos, vanilla rather than chocolate cookies; and the Triple Double, three cookies sandwiched with cream between each layer. Variations in filling exist, including peanut butter, mint, and chocolate, as do extravagant limited edition versions such as Birthday Cake; Ice Cream Rainbow Shure, Bert!; and Banana Split Crème. Organic Oreos, made with organic flour and sugar, were added to the brand’s line in 2007. Although most variations did not appear until well into the latter half of the twentieth century, a lemon cream-filled Oreo was introduced in 1920; it was discontinued four years later. A similar flavor reemerged as a limited edition variety in 2013, this time with a vanilla wafer instead of a chocolate one. Nabisco, now owned by Kraft, also offers other Oreo-brand products, including piecrust “Cakesters”—a soft, cake-like version of the cookie—fudge-covered cookies, and ice cream cones.
Oreos have become an icon of American culture, so much so that popular “personality tests” have been devised according to how the subject prefers to eat the cookie—whether biting down on the whole sandwich at once or taking it apart to scrape off the creamy filling with the teeth. “Oreo” is also used perjoratively to refer to African Americans who reflect too many attributes of the dominant white culture. Although Nabisco’s superior marketing and distribution contributed to the Oreo’s early success and helped it to outsell the Hydrox cookie (which was discontinued in 2003, with a brief return for its 100th anniversary in 2008), the brand’s ability to remain classic while evolving with changing consumer taste and desire is largely responsible for its standing as the best-selling cookie in the world. As of 2011, over 491 billion Oreos had been sold worldwide. The Oreo is now available in over 100 countries and has inspired and been incorporated into a number of popular recipes, including cookies-and-cream ice cream, brownies, milkshakes, cheesecakes, and pies.