Cookie Combination Creativity
Would You Eat an Oreos and Reese's Mashup? Now's Your Chance!
One of my most popular podcast episodes is my interview with Professor Yoed Kennett about his research on remote associations. This is when you combine two things that are very, very different from each other. These are almost always more creative than when you combine two similar things. My favorite example of a remote association is what you might get if you combine a potato chip and a newspaper. This combination really happened! You might have bought it. If you read to the end, you’ll learn what it is!
My example of a close association is Reese’s peanut butter cups, the best-selling candy in the United States. This is the opposite of a remote association. It’s not at all surprising because you’re combining two similar things—two snack foods. Sure, one is sweet, and one is salty, but they’re a lot more similar than a potato chip and a newspaper. Now, let’s try another close association. Let’s combine Reese’s with a cookie. How about an Oreo cookie? Guess what—it’s going to happen! Two new products are being released this fall. And these new inventions are great examples of how creativity works.
To combine Reese’s peanut butter cups and Oreos, two different companies had to collaborate. Hershey’s owns Reese’s and Mondelez owns Oreos. My first reaction was, this is a close association, so it’s not very creative. But now I’ve learned that I was wrong. The invention story shows that this combination is very creative. But the creativity wasn’t the idea; it was the process that made it work. The process was a wandering, iterative path that involved many small ideas along the way. That’s the real story of how creativity works. Is it a “big insight” to think of combining Oreos and Reese’s? I don’t think so. But creating the product required a lot of small ideas, collaborations, working within constraints, divergent thinking—pretty much everything that creativity researchers study!
Jesse Newman of the Wall Street Journal tells the fascinating story. It starts with constraints, and constraints are always part of the creation story. The first constraint is that both Reese’s and Oreos are owned by different companies, and they’re competitors. Neither of the companies wanted to play second fiddle in the flavor department. Whatever they were going to sell together, it had to have both flavors front and forward—neither one could be secondary. And it goes without saying that both companies were going to have to make money on this idea. Mondelez’s head of R&D, Norberto Chaclin, stated the key question: “Can I identify the flavor profile of my Oreo in your product? Or is it being overpowered by your peanut butter?” Think about those two products. Which flavor is more dominant? I’d say that Hershey’s peanut butter would overpower the subtle vanilla of the Oreo and you would lose the vanilla. Maybe the chocolate wafer could hold its own, but without vanilla, it’s not an Oreo.
Another constraint is that the peanut butter is pretty runny once you take it out of the chocolate cup. You can’t just put it inside two chocolate Oreo wafers because it would flow out and the wafers wouldn’t stay together.
It turns out that the two companies have been trying to make this work since at least 2014, when Mondelez released a limited-edition Oreo cookie with Reese’s peanut butter filling. It was a cookie that had Oreo vanilla flavor for one-half of the filling, and Reese’s peanut butter on the other half.
It was limited edition, but when they took it off the market, fans were sad. Some fans kept the idea alive. On TikTok and Instagram, you can find DIY mashups like this one:
How can you make this idea work? Maybe it’s not such a surprising breakthrough idea, but the process requires a lot of creativity. At the beginning, you need divergent thinking: the ability to come up with many variants of the combination. See if you can think of your own combinations, on top of these TikTok versions:
Smush a Reese’s cup between two Oreo wafers
Scoop peanut butter out of the Reese’s and spread it between two Oreo wafers
Put an Oreo on top of a Reese’s cup
Stuff the Reese’s cup with Oreo crumbles
Put both of them into the same cake
Put both of them into ice cream (I think I’ve had that one)
The two companies had been following social media since the 2014 limited release. Every company follows social media all the time! You really want to listen to your most serious fans. So in 2022, some people from both companies secretly got together. They started with the idea of putting the Reese’s peanut butter inside the Oreo. But remember, it has to taste like both snacks at the same time. Your first attempt is going to taste pretty much like an Oreo, right? Yes, it does.
And from the Oreo side—Hershey wanted the new candy to taste like both chocolate and vanilla filling. Otherwise, it’s just chocolate, or it’s just vanilla, and neither alone would be an Oreo. So we’ve got four flavors that have to work together—chocolate, peanut butter, the Oreo cookie, and the creme layer. In creativity research terms, that might still count as a “near association,” but with four different things being combined, I think that requires genuine creativity.
Creativity researchers have spent decades studying different kinds of combinations of two things, but never combinations of four things. Creativity researchers don’t have a word for combining lots of things together. We should study that!
Here’s the biggest constraint of all: Both companies wanted to have their own version of the combination. So they needed two products, and both companies had to sign off on the other company’s invention.
The companies worked together and tried almost 40 variations. Finally, they got it to work, for both companies! Here’s what we’re going to see in stores this fall:
OREO REESE’S cookie: Mondelez’s final product is a new cookie with finely ground Oreo crumbs in its peanut butter filling.
REESE’S OREO cup: Hershey’s final product is a cup with a top-to-bottom split between the white Oreo cream and the brown Reese’s chocolate, with chunks of Oreo crumble in the peanut butter.
What about a potato chip and a magazine? Well, it could be a lot of things. That’s the whole point of a remote association—the solution isn’t obvious, so there isn’t a linear path from challenge to solution. Leave a comment below with your own idea! Personally, the combination makes me think of Pringle’s Prints potato chips. You can’t buy them any more, but they were pretty cool: They had text printed on them with edible vegetable-based dye. They had pretty dorky jokes and puns on them, kind of like a fortune cookie (or a dad).
The Pringle’s Prints never caught on and they were phased out after less than 10 years. I’m a fan, though! If someone at Kellogg’s is reading this, please consider bringing back the chips!