Good Seasons Italian Dressing Cruet Kit SECRET

When we were growing up, our salads only knew two types of dressing: French and the make-it-yourself Good Seasons Italian. In purchasing the Good Seasons Italian Dressing packets, my father had the grocery store under his thumb for he knew the secret of the cruet!

On each of his four children’s thirteenth birthday, he would impart the secret of the Good Seasons Italian Dressing Cruet Kit to us. Now, I will share that secret with you.


Photo by Mike Hopkins

To get consumers hooked on their Italian Dressing packets, those crazy marketing folks over at Good Seasons packaged two packs of the dry dressing mix with a FREE cruet. I think “cruet” was second foreign word I learned right after “Irish Spring.” The cruet that came with the dressing had three convenient lines etched on it for easy construction of the Italian Dressing. First V for vinegar, then W for water and last O for oil. Fill each ingredient to its line (pour in the packet between the W and the O,) cap the lid and shake shake shake. In 1983, my brother was making the dressing and put the oil in first. The resulting explosion took off the east wing of our kitchen and Steve never heard the same out of his remaining ear.

The marketing folks assumed that you would by the cruet kit the first time and then buy the individual packets from then out. But they never calculated the my dad would figure out their little secret.

So back to my thirteenth birthday… after the cake and the gifts, dad took me into the kitchen and showed me the cruet kit and said, “When you buy the Italian dressing in the kit, they give you two packets of dressing and the cruet. If you buy the packets individually, THEY COST MORE PER PACK! When you buy the kit, you are getting the packets cheaper AND a free cruet.” It was then that I noticed the third shelf up in our dishware cabinet was filled with cruets. The everything drawer teemed with the plastic lids. Week by week and cruet by cruet, my father was slowly putting the Good Seasons people out of business.

Just the other day at Kroger’s, I took these photos. I’ll help with the math:
Cruet Kit


$2.79 or $1.395 per packet

Individual dressing packet


$1.59 per packet

A savings of $.195 per packet. I figure in my father’s lifetime, he has saved about $25,345. That’s almost enough to cover the by-pass surgery! He’s also got a basement full of cruets and no other glassware to be found in the house.

As for me? I have saved $1.17 because as soon as Miss Sally noticed what I was doing, she shut down the cruet purchases and made me spend the extra twenty cents to buy the packets individually sans cruet. Miss Sally runs a tight ship.

I can’t wait for my kids to turn thirteen.

EDITOR'S NOTE:
A lot of people find this site because they are searching for replacement lids or cruet kits. If I was smart, I would sell them from this site and make a billion dollars. But I am not smart. If you want to buy the kits on line, look here at Net Grocer.

If you want to complain about why Good Seasons is no longer in your local store, write and/or all here:
Kraft Foods Global, Inc.
Global Consumer Relations
1 Kraft Court
Glenview, IL 60025
1-877-535-5666

Good luck. Please tell them I said, "Howdy!"

The Bacon Pop - Popcorn Secret

I received this box of Bacon Pop - Bacon Flavored Microwave Popcorn as my Reddit Secret Santa Gift. I could not wait to try it!

There were three bags in the box.  

The directions were the same as regular pop corn except there were a lot more warnings about which side to keep down. There was also a warning in large letters, "Don't Burn Your Bacon."

I started to wonder what the secret to the bacon flavored popcorn was. The packaging said that there was no bacon in the product, only popcorn, oil and bacon flavoring. (It's actually a vegan product!)  So I decided to cut it open to see what was inside.

I pulled back the wrapping and found a bunch of kernels of corn with some kind of solidified oil.  It was exactly as you might expect.  before my disappointment set in, I felt something under my fingers on the side.

It was BACON!  Real, raw bacon!














I tried to pull it out, but it was stuck along the top and bottom edges.  There was a slab of bacon on either side.















I wasn't going to let this go to waste, so I taped the bag up as best I could.














And put it in the microwave.

In about four minutes it was done.  The bag barely held together with the tape.  The tape was a little stinky, but the bacon smell much more prevalent. 

I dumped the bag out into a bowl.

And for some reason, there was no bacon in with the popcorn.  I thought that maybe that is how they cook and flavor the popcorn. If the bacon disappears during cooking, then maybe it is not considered a food.  But then I looked in the bag.

There it was!  I tried to shake and crinkle it out, but it wouldn't budge.  So I got out a knife and scraped it out.

It took some doing and I ended up breaking it into pieces.



Upon further investigation, I found that the bacon had a very sticky substance on either end.  Closer inspection revealed that it was a highly concentrated maple syrup.  I think this is what kept it stuck to the side.

I think that because the bacon is part of the packaging, it is not actually considered part of the food, so they can still say it is a vegan product.  I mean, you don't see "aluminum" in the ingredients on a can of soda, right?

Well, that's all our investigative reporting for today.  Next week, we go searching for the palm and olive in Palmolive soap.

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