A few months back, my girlfriend threw a party at her apartment and put together a pretty impressive snack spread.  All the bases were covered – hors d’oeuvres, veggies, chips, dips, baked goods…. but there was also a somewhat inconspicuous bowl of Goldfish.   I was shooting the breeze with some chums by the snack station and I noticed that despite the plethora of deliciousness available to the crowd, the Goldfish were being depleted at a swift rate.  Granted, I was generously helping myself to the fish, but I wasn’t the only one.  The other snacks were eaten too, but I was surprised that despite all of the competition on the table, the Goldfish were one of the most popular snacks.  I also heard a party-goer say “Damn… Goldfish were awesome when I was 6 and they’re still awesome today”.  Amen.

The fact that people forget how good Goldfish are is puzzling since you can buy them almost anywhere and they’ve been around forever.  But why are they so underrated?  Why are they the forgotten snack?  Why don’t you see them at Super Bowl parties?  I think a big reason for this is because Pepperidge Farm has their own aisle in the supermarkets and bodegas, and it’s usually not close to the chip section.  While it’s pretty cool to have your own aisle in a store, I think it’s doing them an injustice.  I get that PF sells mostly cookies and baked goods and this is why their section is closer to the cookie aisle than the chip aisle, but if the Goldfish were separated and sold in the chip aisle, I guarantee that you would see them at more parties.  Especially if they changed the packaging so that it resembles a small bag of chips instead of the iconic PF bag they come in now.  Messing with brand recognition is usually a risky move, but I think it could help in this case.  They can still sell Goldfish in the current bags that they have now, but if they also had a potato chip-esque bag with a less kid-friendly design (putting a beard and reading glasses on Finn the fish would give him a distinguished, sophisticated look) and placed it in the chip aisle, people would be more likely to snatch ’em up.

Unfortunately, I don’t see this happening any time soon since PF has been doing what they do for like 1000 years, but I for one would like to see more Goldfish at parties and… holy crap I just thought of something… imagine you could get a giant bucket of Goldfish at a movie theater???  Sweet Christ,  I would go to a movie every other day.  It would probably cost like $200 though.  So worth it.