Care for a dip?Barely a month has passed since Mr. Tidbit encountered DiGiorno's frozen Pizza & Cookies, complete with a baking option that produced the finished pizza and the finished chocolate-chip cookies at the same time, a dining strategy that Mr. Tidbit found amusing. (He didn't mention it at the time, but DiGiorno, a Nestle frozen-pizza label that used to belong to Kraft, has also introduced Pizza &Wyngz, the latter being boneless-wing-like "fully cooked chicken breast chunk fritters with rib meat.")
And now another Nestle (formerly Kraft) frozen-pizza label, California Pizza Kitchen, brings us Pizza & Appetizer -- the latter being spinach artichoke dip and a circle of flatbread wedges: You microwave the dip and put the flatbread in the oven with the pizza but it's done 6 minutes before the pizza is. Mr. Tidbit has, himself, never felt a need to precede pizza with an appetizer, but Nestle seems to think the nation has been muttering "Pizza already? Can't we have something else first?" At one discount supermarket the California Pizza Kitchen items with the appetizer dip were $1.05 more than the dipless pizzas of roughly equal weight.
Filled cookiesChips Ahoy! has introduced Chewy Gooey fudge-filled soft chocolate-chip cookies in two versions: chocofudge (regular soft cookie) and megafudge (chocolate soft cookie). And at virtually the same moment, Pepperidge Farm has introduced Milano Melts: regular or chocolate Milano-type cookies -- Mr. Tidbit would say they are a bit crisper than regular Milanos -- fully enclosing a chocolate creme or "dark classic creme" filling.
The filled-cookie idea isn't the only thing these two products have in common. Surprise: They both cost more than the originals. The bag of regular Chewy Chips Ahoy! cookies weighs 14 ounces and contains 28 cookies; the same-price bag of the new fudge-filled version weighs just 10 ounces and contains only 18 cookies. The bag of regular Milanos weighs from 6 to 7 1/2 ounces (depending on variety) and contains 15 or 16 cookies. The same-price bag of Milano Melts weighs 5.75 ounces and contains 12 cookies.
AL SICHERMAN
