The Potato Revival Celebration

For the fans of potato chips like me out there, you probably remember the tragic event last year of the typhoons hindering the farming of potatoes, resulting in a low production of potatoes thus affecting potato chips too. For months in 2017, many supermarket shelves had to leave their potato chip racks empty with hopes of new stocks coming, only to realize that the affect was more severe than expected. Then they restocked the same shelves with non-potato junk food instead.

This year, the potatoes are back! And to celebrate and/or apologize for the "trouble" of the lacking potatoes, many potato chip manufacturers started doing this "celebrating of the potato revival" campaign with their products. Since a couple of months ago, I realized on many bags of potato chips that they wrote something along the line of "potato festival", and that the bag came with extra chips between 10% to 30%. So a normally 60 grams bag may have been increased to 66 grams to even 78 grams for the same price! It was truly something to rejoice about. I was definitely sold on it and bought more bags than normal to stock up and enjoy.

It was also interesting to see because this apology/celebration with a mess is also very personable, and I feel like something like this would never been seen in Western products. I don't see oreoes or lays giving us extra cookies because of a festive production of ingredients.

However, I am always skeptical about marketing schemes, so it made me wonder: is this really an apology, or is this done because there is a surplus of potatoes? Perhaps it was simply one manufacturer's smart advertising scheme that other competitors had to follow in order to catch up. However, either way I am happy to know that our potato chips are back in full force with a bit extra.