Ready to eat boiled eggs: The craziest convenience food?
Coming soon to supermarket near you … the ready-to-eat soft-boiled egg. This must surely be the daftest convenience food ever. ‘All’ you have to do, to get a perfect soft-boiled egg, is open the plastic container in which the egg is packaged, pour in boiling water,leave for five minutes and, as they say, enjoy.
Hang on a minute…
If you’re making soft-boiled eggs, how long do you generally boil them for? About four minutes for most people, I suspect. So here we have convenience food that takes longer to cook than the non-convenience version. Hmm.
“She’s hopeless in the kitchen.She can’t even boil and egg” people say. But it’s not true, anybody can boil and egg.
There is no special equipment required, no skills, no fancy ingredients – just something to do the timing. Either the timer on your iPhone or an old-fashioned sand filled egg timer. Both work. No mystery.
But buy ready-to-eat egg (which it isn’t) and in your plastic container comesa plastic spoon, a mini sachet of salt and … breadsticks.
Breadsticks? You’d dip breadsticks into your egg? Not proper toast soldiers? What is the world coming to?
Half a dozen eggs arrive from the supermarket packed in biodegradable cardboard-y egg boxes. They can go into the recycling trash or you can use them for a multitude of crafts or household uses. (Many people use them as pots for raising seedlings). These ready-to-eat eggs (what a misnomer) come surrounded in plastic packaging, plus spoon. But wait, as they say in the infomercials, the lid of the plastic container ‘cleverly’ becomes an egg cup. But then what? You don’t want a collection of plastic spoons and eggcups. The whole lot is going to end up being thrown away … and all because you can’t be bothered to boil an egg.
Ah, some people have said, what if you’re at work and you don’t have a stove on which to boil your eggs? Well firstly, I think that sandwich, wrap, salad, etc. makes better at-work food but secondly, you can boil an egg without a stove. Put the egg into your coffee mug, put it in the microwave and remove when the water starts to boil. Six minutes later (depending on the size of your egg) it will be done – and every office has a microwave, right?
Believe it or not, it gets worse. To buy your single egg and all its associated packaging will cost you five times more that buying a regular egg.
Could it get even worse? Yep. I worked for many years for a design and branding company and in that time we named and created hundreds of products. Naming product is serious business. The name you decide to give your product has a huge number of ramifications. Some brand names become generic words such as band aid, jacuzzi, velcro, thermos and champagne.
I can’t see that happening in this case though. Here’s a screenshot from their website. What bright spark thought up that one?
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