SpaghettiOs is an American brand of canned sauce that contains circular pasta in said sauce. It is marketed to parents as "less messy" than regular spaghetti. More than 150 million cans of SpaghettiOs are sold each year. Variations have included meatballs, pieces of processed meat resembling hot dog slices, beef-filled ravioli, and calcium-fortified spaghetti, among others.
History
Introduced in 1965 by the Campbell Soup Company under the Franco-American brand, the pasta was created by Donald Goerke, nicknamed "the Daddy-O of SpaghettiOs", after a year-long internal study of the appropriate shape for a pasta dish that people could eat without making a mess. Rejected shapes included cowboys, Native Americans, astronauts, stars, and sports-themed shapes. During the development of SpaghettiOs, Goerke was a marketing manager with Franco-American, then a division of Campbell. Goerke created over 100 products during his 35 years with Campbell, including the Chunky line of soups. SpaghettiOs were introduced nationally without test marketing and with television advertising using the tag line "the neat round spaghetti you can eat with a spoon" and the jingle "Uh-Oh! SpaghettiOs" sung by Jimmie Rodgers.
Controversy
Recall
In June 2010, Campbell recalled 15 million lbs of SpaghettiOs with Meatballs due to the malfunction of a cooker at one of the company's Texas plants. No reports of illnesses associated with the product and no customer complaints were recorded at the time of the recall.
On December 7, 2013, the 72nd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, SpaghettiOs' Twitter account posted a picture of a smiling cartoon SpaghettiO holding the U.S. flag and captioned, "Take a moment to remember #PearlHarbor with us." The posting was met with criticism by users, who found the tweet to be disrespectful to those who were affected by the attack. The post also quickly spawned parodies, as other users such as comedianPatton Oswalt edited the cartoon SpaghettiO into photos of other national tragedies such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 9/11, the Hindenburg disaster, the SpaceShuttleChallenger explosion, and the sinking of the Titanic. SpaghettiOs quickly removed the tweet in question and apologized for any offense it may have caused.
