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Flavor change leaves a bad taste

The Frosty appeared on the original Wendy's menu in 1969. Part milk shake, part ice cream, Wendy's founder Dave Thomas created it himself, according to Wendy's lore. He wanted it so thick you had to eat it with a spoon, but not so chocolatey the flavor overwhelmed the burgers. It held its own on the menu until August.

By BJORN KRUSE
Published September 5, 2006

	Frosty flavors How do you take your Frosty? Original chocolate New vanilla

I didn't know how to answer. I tried to respond, sputtered, tried again, let fly a few eye twitches and finally managed, "Not vanilla."

"So chocolate?"

Salt in the wound.

"I want a Frosty, the original. Not vanilla."

She nodded, turned to grab a large size cup and vanished for a while. She returned with what I wanted, though it was about three fingers short of full.

I was too weary of our earlier exchange and the atmosphere it had resulted in to ask her to vanish for an another oddly long duration to fill my cup to capacity.

I paid her $1.54, doffed the cap, grabbed a spoon, exited the establishment and pulled back into the rising rush hour. On NPR I heard that a tanker full of human excrement had turned over on Route 24, a disruption that was sure to ramify all over southeastern Massachusetts.

But all I could think of was Shame on Wendy's. By the ghost of Dave Thomas, shame on them, whatever couple of Bobs are at the helm now, for casting in the shadow of doubt the singular purity of the Frosty.

Confident in its contradiction, they had even put out a commercial that made me think they got it. "Sa-quid: neither solid nor liquid," the marvelling teens said, relishing the Frosty's defiance of classification.

But I see now that whatever Wendy's shot-callers were behind that one could not line up another set of youths to publicize its gustatory ambiguities by gasping "Choconilla" and gazing befuddled at their cups.

The beauty of Frosty is that it's always been just that - Frosty - its own flavor that at once reduced designations of chocolate and vanilla to the flaccid abstractions of philosophers and fools.

Shame on Wendy's for subjecting its half-frozen, flavor-transcending creation to the shortsightedness of fast-food taxonomy. Shame on Wendy's for fixing what wasn't broke. Shame on Wendy's for trying to improve by diminution, for mistaking regression with progress.

Vanilla is a step back. Vanilla is the basement. Vanilla, at least in the fast food lexicon, is the absence of flavor from which one may contemplate getting one's groove back with the help of chocolate or strawberry.

If you positively must introduce a new Frosty flavor, it should be something daring, something more befitting Wendy's well-earned reputation as a fast food innovator, something that will make motorists collide with each other just thinking about it.

Blackberry-Pomegranate. Melon Crazy. Starfruit. Smoked Oyster, for crying out loud. Not vanilla.

Frosty was always above that. Somewhere between home-sweet-home and highway-to-hell was Frosty. It came in one flavor because it knew it was the best.

Do whatever you want, Wendy's. Go broke trying to sell the s---. Or get rich, see if I care.

Just don't call it Frosty. And don't act as if Frosty was chocolate all along.

Bjorn Kruse is a freelance writer in Massachusetts.

[Last modified September 4, 2006, 19:13:24]