So bacon scented items are still all the rage. Just a few months ago, I blogged about the bacon-scented masks that were being given away by Hormel Foods.
“On the heels” of that, one of Hormel’s competitors has come up with a new wearable bacon-scented item. Bacon-scented shoe laces. Yes, it’s true. Kraft Heinz subsidiary Oscar Mayer announced the new scented laces on its Twitter feed recently.
Oscar Mayer is piggybacking, if you will, off of the re-release of the Nike running shoe, the Air Max 90 Bacon Trainer. Evidently this is a product that went away, and is coming back. According to a blog from Luke Taylor, Nike teamed up with Dave’s Quality Meats in 2004, a New York sneaker and streetwear store that featured a butcher theme. That is where the concept was born.
The shoes come in a bacon-colored design, too. As do the new laces.
Why? You might wonder. It was speculated on WFXB that it was to make people run faster because dogs would be chasing them.
But let’s be honest: Who goes around smelling their shoes, not to mention other people’s shoes? There’s a reason kids say “trick or treat, smell my feet.” It’s just something folks don’t want to do.
I guess it’s all about offering consumers a choice. Just like whether you would choose to eat bacon from pigs or bacon from turkeys. If there is a demand for them, then power to Nike and Oscar Mayer, and I hope this product launch is successful.
But I have to wonder what kind of conversations we would have had, had the Air Max 90 Bacon Trainers been on the market a month ago when it was time to go shopping for shoes for my son’s upcoming track season. And if these shoes had been available at the start of the season, would these be the big thing for teenage track athletes?
If so, and thinking back to what the WFXB news crew pondered, I’m glad that pretty much all of the towns where our school’s track team will be competing this season have leash laws. Otherwise, we’d be living in the dog days of spring.
