From State Line to Cheerwine to Krystal vs. White Castle, what are the regional brands you love?
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For the most part you can walk into any grocery store in the United States and count on finding the same brands you’d find in any other part of the country: Frito-Lay chips, Coke and Pepsi, Jif and Skippy peanut butter, and more. Similarly, when you pull ofFrom State Line to Cheerwine to Krystal vs. White Castle, what are the regional brands you love?
For the most part you can walk into any grocery store in the United States and count on finding the same brands you’d find in any other part of the country: Frito-Lay chips, Coke and Pepsi, Jif and Skippy peanut butter, and more. Similarly, when you pull off the highway you can probably count on finding a McDonald’s, maybe a Burger King or a Taco Bell. But what about the brands you can’t find just anywhere? Is there a regional brand you grew up with and can’t quit? Or is finding something that shows you’re far from home, culturally speaking, one of the charms of traveling? Teddie peanut butter is a New England brand that isn’t sold everywhere, but thanks to the miracle of the internet, it wasn’t one more sacrifice I had to make during the year I lived in San Francisco. No other peanut butter compares—and believe me, through years of moving around, I bought a whole lot of brands of natural peanut butter before coming to that conclusion. Potato chips are a classic case of competing regional brands. Utz, Golden Flake, Wise, Mister Bee … the list goes on and on. Cape Cod might sound like the classic New England chip, but the brand dates only to 1980. The real old-school Massachusetts-Connecticut chip, as I remember it, was State Line, but its later years raise the question of whether a brand that’s been brought back from the dead by a big company without the same local connections is really the same. The southern U.S. may be a standout region for fast food. The White Castle vs. Krystal line is widely known (but perhaps less well known is how much better Krystal is), and Waffle House and Krispy Kreme (and here I don’t see how regionalism could win out—Dunkin Donuts is just an inferior product) have spread beyond their origins, to the benefit of all those who now have access. But sometimes it seems like if you drive down any given street in the South, you’ll see three fast food chains you never heard of before. There’s Jack's, for instance, and no, that’s not the much larger Jack in the Box. But the South is not alone in having standout regional fast food. Probably no discussion of regional products is complete without a Cheerwine reference, so there it is. So, what are your favorite regional brands? (Let’s leave discussions of regional cuisines and eating patterns for another day—books could be written on barbecue alone.) Read more