Please note The Little Utz Girl in the photograph below.
Little Utz Girl is the actual name of the character on the bag of my student’s potato chips. Customers in the 1920’s began calling her The Little Utz Girl, and the name stuck.
What do you see when you look at her?
If you’re a normal person, it’s likely that you see a little girl reaching her hand into a bag of chips, but if you’re like me (and this may say something very specific about me), you see a maniacal young girl holding a doubly-serrated knife, dripping with a black substance.
Hopefully it’s not just me who sees this. It’s no fun being crazy on your own.
You might’ve also noticed the name “The Crab Chip” and the indication that the chip is made with Chesapeake Bay crab seasoning.
I won’t get into the odd use of quotation marks in the product’s moniker, but I wondered what the hell crab seasoning might be.
In fact, I asked my student why she was eating gluten-free potato chips sprinkled with the desiccated, pulverized husks of executed Chesapeake crabs.
It proved to be an excellent vocabulary lesson.
It turns out that Chesapeake crab seasoning is actually Old Bay seasoning, which is a mix are paprika, celery seed, salt and black pepper. The marketers at Utz apparently think it advantageous to refer to the well known, much beloved Old Bay seasoning as crab seasoning on their packaging.
Far be it for me to tell the Utz people how to run their company (though this has rapidly become the reason many companies are hiring me to consult with them), but as a consumer, Old Bay sounds a hell of a lot more appealing than crab.
Then again, when I look at The Little Utz Girl, I still see a little girl holding a poorly designed knife dripping with black goo, so what the hell do I know?
