All the king’s horses

Humpty Dumpty Snack Foods is closing its plant in Brampton, putting 188 people out of work – citing the trend toward healthier eating as a factor. Pursuing that market requires some geographical reshuffling, evidently. The media coverage from the last several years, as preserved on Humpty Dumpty’s own corporate site, reads rather bleak: A plunging U.S. dollar, the higher cost of frying oil, and an outdated brand that seemed to exist only as an afterthought on store shelves. Demand evidently didn’t increase after commercials depicting it as the preferred snack of blasé emo boys – caught swabbing cheese powder on a woman’s underwear in the laundromat, and circumstances leading to ketchup chip residue ending up on pubescent female breasts. (Watch them here.) Products bearing names like Cruncheez and Nachoz also seem like a lost cause, and anyone who can read the nutritional information on those pseudo-high-end Maine Coast bags can only feel better about sucking back a few artery-filling Frappuccinos instead. The salty snack obsessives at taquitos.net cover some of Humpty Dumpty’s output – which will continue in three other facilities east of here – rating 48 different flavours, and noting the company produces both "Ridgies" and "Ripples", plus several varieties available only along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard. Humpty Dumpty BBQ Nachos (with an "s") currently stand among the top ten snack foods ever; the more exotically regional Sour Cream and Clam Artificially Flavored Ripple Chips curdle among the all-time worst.