Last October, on their popular podcast New Heights, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce interrupted his Philadelphia Eagles center brother, Jason, to say that there is a certain snack he eats “probably more than I eat anything else in the world.” It was Uncrustables, he admitted, the frozen peanut-butter-and-jelly discs made by the J.M. Smucker Co. that, in America over the past year, have become almost as omnipresent as Travis’s girlfriend, Taylor Swift.

“Listen,” Jason cut in, “Uncrustable”—fans often refer to it in the singular—”has been a fantastic invention that was not around when we were kids.”

The Kelces couldn’t have known, but they had just activated a trip wire that Smucker was waiting for. When, days later, a company executive came across an article that gushed, “The snack Travis Kelce eats ‘more than anything else in the world,’” news spread fast. An email about it that circulated among the finance team got forwarded to SVP Rebecca Scheidler, who texted chief marketing executive Gail Hollander. Hollander shot back, “Yes, we are on it.”

“My phone blows up anytime there’s a mention of a celebrity and Uncrustables,” explains Scheidler, who became Smucker’s general manager of consumer goods in January 2023. “At that moment, it was like ‘Ding, ding, ding—we have to move on this one.’”

Out of the lunch bag and into pop culture

Uncrustables “is a product that’s been around for a really long time,” acknowledges CMO Hollander. But until recently, as far as the $12 billion packaged food conglomerate was concerned, “it wasn’t really a brand.”

Smucker had purchased a prepackaged PB&J company called Incredible Uncrustables in 1998, from two Fargo, North Dakota, fathers who were trying to market their crustless novelties to Midwestern school cafeterias. A retired Smucker executive’s wife saw them in a Market Day school-fundraising catalog, and the company wrote the dads a $1 million check.

Smucker made $12 million the following year selling those sandwiches. Popularity grew. They were perfect for refueling kids at youth sporting events. Adults liked their compact energy, too. Soon, they were being pulled from briefcases in busy offices, and subjected to creative internet hacks, where fans suggested cooking them in air fryers or garnishing with syrup and chopped nuts. The truly obsessed began to DIY them: an Amazon search for “uncrustables sandwich maker” yields 10 pages of off-brand molds in patterns from circle and star to dinosaur. A school of extremists arose who further uncrusted their Uncrustables, removing the tiny edges—radicalism that has drawn eye rolls from the Kelces.

Smucker produced a million of these iconic products per day in 2015, three million by 2022, and almost five million last year. This sounds like a nice problem to have if you’re a CPG brand. Yet the issue since the very beginning—and the reason why all Uncrustables promotion had been organic until last fall—was that demand kept outpacing supply. “Back in 1998, they were being hand-crimped on the way out the door,” Scheidler explains. “A big part of the journey was how we scale production. There has been a lot of engineering focused on how we bake the bread, assemble the sandwiches, and freeze them at scale.”

Now the crusts are really about to come off. A third Uncrustables factory—a $1.1 billion project in Alabama—is under construction. An R&D facility focused exclusively on Uncrustables just opened at Smucker’s corporate headquarters in Orrville, Ohio. And the company says that after a decade of work, it has finally created technology to mass-produce the sandwiches so they don’t leak and the bread is still spongy—or “soft and pillowy,” in the Kelces’ verbiage. Last September, Uncrustables debuted in Canada, a market the company was eyeing for 15 years.

Mark Smucker, the company’s president, CEO, and chairman, tells me that the entire corporate business plan now starts with the sandwiches. “In the next couple of years, we’re going to get to a billion dollars in sales, and it’s just on the core PB&J sandwich,” he predicts. As Scheidler notes: “Mark has declared numerous times that Uncrustables is our #1 priority. And if you ask him, he’ll say it’s our #2 and #3 priority, too.”

This meant that when the Kelces started randomly raving about them, Smucker was ready to act: The company made a deal weeks later to sponsor the next three episodes of New Heights. It also sent Travis a gift box of sandwiches plus a beaded bracelet that daringly spelled out the words “Taylor Swift”—just weeks after she was spotted at her first Chiefs game. (At concerts, Swifties exchange beaded friendship bracelets; while attending her Eras Tour concert in July, before they were a couple, Travis wanted to hand Swift a bracelet with his phone number on it, but failed.)

But anyone still unfamiliar with Uncrustables by last fall, because they’d been living under a rock without a freezer, might have caught wind of the product in its first-ever paid TV ad, which aired several weeks later, on Monday Night Football. It was a Chiefs-versus-Eagles rematch—of the previous year’s Super Bowl—pitting Kelce brother against Kelce brother again in a game that broke viewership records and, ultimately, proved to be the Kelces’ final face-off. (Jason announced his retirement in March, after cheering on Travis to his third Super Bowl victory.)

The Monday Night Football commercial introduced the snack’s new mascots: Uncrustables, a fun-filled, circular guy with a soft side, and Crust, his older sibling who’s a little rough around the edges and is actually a PB&J sandwich with a large, Uncrustables-size hole punched out of his midsection. He oozes peanut butter and jelly as he walks, and in the spot, it’s clear he is working through the feelings of having to live in the shadow of his flashier, suddenly famous sibling—aka “the best part of the sandwich.”

Called the Bread Brothers, the two mascots had actually been created three years earlier, Hollander swears. Any similarities to the Kelces? “That was luck,” Mark Smucker says with a chuckle.

Building a brand, finally

For most of its 128-year existence, the J.M. Smucker Co. has been known for basic pantry staples like Folgers coffee, Crisco shortening, Pillsbury baking mixes, and Milk-Bone dog biscuits. “But we have to keep evolving,” acknowledges Mark. He represents the fifth generation to lead the company, which was founded by his great-great grandfather, Jerome Monroe, in order to sell apple butter made with fruit from trees supposedly grown by Johnny Appleseed himself. “And we have changed, but we’ve changed the most in the past 25 years.” Uncrustables had a lot to do with it. Success “didn’t happen overnight,” he tells me, “but we stuck with it until we got it right. We acquired Jif peanut butter”—in 2001—“and we were already #1 in jams and jellies. It was like, ‘This is a no-brainer.’”

For decades, the company’s leaders had believed that the best type of advertising was word of mouth. The resolve cracked in the 1980s, when the company finally adopted a marketing slogan (“With a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good”). Then, over the past several years, it turned more attention to polishing the images of brands it acquired. Folgers, for instance, traded the emotional holiday-homecoming commercials for an ad called “Allow us to reintroduce ourselves,” where Joan Jett shouts, “I don’t give a damn ’bout my reputation!” Jif jettisoned “Choosy moms choose Jif” for Ludacris rapping with a mouthful of peanut butter. Both of these were the result of a new marketing partnership Smucker inked with Publicis Groupe. Hollander, who was then at Publicis, became the account lead; she joined Smucker as chief marketing officer last March.

As production ramps up, ensuring that the company is able to put its sandwiches where its (and your) mouth is, Smucker will be free to “market the brand for the first time in its decades-long history,” Scheidler says. Translation: “Now we get to do the fun things.”

The sandwich of champions

As the story goes, before a Boston Celtics game in the late 2000s, hall of fame power forward Kevin Garnett satisfied his hunger pains with a PB&J. He posted impressive numbers that evening, the ritual stuck, and soon fellow Celtics were requesting their own PB&Js. Other teams caught the bug shortly thereafter. Soon, the NBA found itself in the midst of a league-wide “secret addiction,” ESPN would argue in 2017 in a now-famous feature by Baxter Holmes that Mark Smucker remembers reading. It was a snack mandated by teams across the country, the league’s Most Valuable Sandwich. “There was no putting the jelly back in the jar,” as Holmes phrased it.

PB&Js were available around the clock in the Houston Rockets’ kitchen. The Milwaukee Bucks leveled up to PB&J-infused waffles, recovery shakes, and oatmeal. By 2017, prior to tip-off, the Cavs, in Smucker’s home state of Ohio, were consuming “artisanal PB&Js” made with homemade raspberry jelly or bananas and almond butter, but serving the opposing team Uncrustables as part of a good-natured gag that J.M. Smucker, the local business supplying them, was in on.

“The athlete piece started to bubble up,” Mark tells me, and Smucker spied a crucial opportunity to position the PB&J as an option for adults who need workout fuel or portable snacks. 

Meanwhile, demand for Uncrustables kept rising. Charles Barkley, long retired from basketball and now a commentator, riffed during a 2023 halftime show about how he keeps boxes of Uncrustables “stacked in the freezer at home.” The sandwich made surprise cameos during major golf tournaments last year. Handed an Uncrustable during an interview last August, legendary Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto looked at the camera and said, “If you guys have never had these? Wow, incredible.” The Baltimore Ravens, it was revealed, downed 7,500 last season.

Smucker is engaging with stars in the entertainment sphere, too. “You probably saw the Drake thing?” Mark says to me, referring to a video that went viral last July of the musician scarfing one down, mid-performance. Mark has been producing electronic music since high school (as DJ Mind.E, he may give Goldman CEO David Solomon a run for his money). He knows of one DJ whose contract rider stipulates that Uncrustables must be on hand. Dillon Francis, a celebrity DJ with five million social media followers, posted a TikTok of himself eating an Uncrustable during his first show of 2023. Actually, he took just one bite, then parked the rest inside the DJ booth. “The next thing he knew, the bouncer was eating it,” Mark laughs. Clubs in other cities later gave Francis whole boxfuls as a sort of in-joke.

@dillonfrancis

first L of 2023 in the books

? original sound – Dillon Francis

Then when Travis Kelce hosted Saturday Night Live last year—only the ninth athlete in 49 seasons to do so—cast member Heidi Gardner (an unabashed Chiefs fan) had three boxes delivered to his room backstage. Unfortunately for Smucker, no one has caught sight of Taylor Swift eating one in public . . . or not yet, anyway.

The secret recipe

Smucker is tight-lipped about what goes on inside the modern Uncrustables manufacturing plants, other than to stress that a decade of R&D led to its mysterious proprietary bread-making technology. Though if anyone is curious, the peanut butter and jelly filling isn’t just Jif and Smucker’s (I asked).

Of course, this air of mystery adds intrigue. An Uncrustable is frozen, like a Nestlé Hot Pocket or Pillsbury Toaster Strudel, yet unlike either, it defrosts on its own and is eaten at room temperature, no heating necessary. It is also hard to categorize. People everywhere from professional women’s soccer practice to YouTube cooking shows to Twitch and (of course) Reddit have debated whether Uncrustables violate the legal definition of a sandwich and instead should be deemed a stuffed food akin to dumplings, ravioli, and potpies.

@orlandopride

A very important question for this week’s QOTW: Are Uncrustables a ravioli or a sandwich? #orlandopride #nwsl #orlando #QOTW

? original sound – Orlando Pride

“Let’s revisit, now that we’re part of the Uncrustables family—are Uncrustables dumplings?” Jason Kelce wondered in December on New Heights, leading the brothers to muse: “Either dumplings or empanadas.” “More of an omelet.” “A jelly-filled doughnut.”

Meanwhile, as Uncrustables marches toward becoming the Kleenex, Coke, or Band-Aid of “sealed crustless sandwiches,” copycats have naturally started to emerge. Smucker has attempted to stop competitors from imitating its sandwich’s distinctive flying-saucer shape, which is trademarked, but not totally patented. (It’s complicated: The U.S. patent and trademark office denied the company’s application in 2000 to expand the original patent granted in 1998, and an appeals court upheld the decision. Smucker argued that the proprietary design was patentable because the seal happens via compression, rather than by the sandwiches being “smushed” à la ravioli.)

Smucker has still taken certain imitators to court. In 2020, it sent Los Angeles-based Chubby Snacks a cease-and-desist letter for selling a higher-protein, lower-sugar version of the round snack. (Chubby Snacks has since “differentiated” its product—still filled with peanut butter and jelly—by giving it a cloudlike shape.) Two years later, Smucker did the same with a Minnesota company, Gallant Tiger, that had introduced upscale, round, crustless PB&Js with ingredients like blueberry bourbon sage jam encased in sourdough. Smucker eventually dropped the trademark infringement claim. (Gallant Tiger’s PB&Js are currently offered by only a handful of Twin Cities coffee shops, though in February the owner said they’re gearing up to go bigger.) Late last year, Walmart’s private-label brand, Great Value, debuted peanut-butter-and-jelly-filled No Crust Sandwiches. The edges are crimped, but the shape is square, not round.

One copycat that avoided a legal challenge was an unfrozen gourmet variation, sold by Umami Burger founder Adam Fleischman, from what began as a pop-up in Los Angeles. Fleischman recently closed the fancified-Uncrustables operation, after six years, but once told Los Angeles Times: “Everyone has their memory of what it is; I think we’ve been able to elevate it and gourmet-ify it.” The paper christened his homage to the snack a “Marcel Proust moment via Don Draper.”

Increased competition can’t have hurt Smucker’s drive, either, to develop new, more exciting flavors, something Mark says the company plans to double down on in the coming months, starting with raspberry. The company has also teased a ready-to-eat formulation of Uncrustables capable of being stored in a refrigerated case. (Mark and Scheidler each acknowledged that shopper confusion exists about where to find Uncrustables—yes, they are frozen, on the aisle where supermarkets store frozen foods.) That reformulation effort happens to follow Smucker’s $5.6 billion acquisition of Twinkie-maker Hostess. Now there are ready channels the company can use to distribute Uncrustables broadly across America’s 150,000 convenience stores. Those next-level ready-to-eat PB&Js could soon become the new Twinkies.