Why the canned meat that gave rise to the term ‘spam’ breaks sales records

With more than eight decades in the market, canned meat brand Spam posted record sales in 2021 for the seventh consecutive year..

The good performance of the company was highlighted by Jim Snee, president of Hormel Foods, the American company that owns the brand, in a press conference for investors, after the publication of the results of the group after the end of the October period.

The product, launched in 1937, became very popular with its customers for being relatively inexpensive and having a long life. During World War II it was distributed by the ton and was used to feed both American troops and European civilians from allied nations.

Spam was also highly consumed in the post-conflict years, when many countries were trying to rebuild and food was scarce.

Over time, this product became synonymous with a cheap ingredient in the West, but it was seen as a “delicacy” in the Asia-Pacific region, which partly explains the success of the brand in recent years..

Spam was brought to South Korea by the US Army during the Korean War in the 1950s, in an attempt to address the lack of food during the conflict. However, the product was so absorbed by South Korean culture that it became one of the country’s favorite dishes: budae jjigae the ‘military upholstery’.

During the Lunar New Year, it is sold in emporiums and supermarkets as a luxury item, in special packaging, used by Koreans as a gift.

This canned food also has a large market in the state of Hawaii, where it is on the menu of several restaurants in the archipelago.. There it is eaten for breakfast with eggs and rice. Also in other fried rice dishes or as a kind of sushi, el “Spam musubi”.

From can to emails

The popularity it gained after WWII would make it, years later, synonymous with the spam tray.

According to etymologist Graeme Donald, the relationship dates back to a sketch by the British comedy group Monty Python from the 70s, in which a couple goes to a restaurant where each item on the menu has Spam as an ingredient. Although the woman makes it clear that she does not like canned food, the assistant repeats in a shrill voice: “Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam …”, a mantra repeated in chorus by a group of Vikings who are also on the scene.

The use of the word as a synonym for ‘annoying and unwanted message’ started as a joke among internet users, but quickly became universal, as reported by the American radio station. NPR in an interview with Finn Brunton, author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (‘Spam: a secret history of the internet’).

The brand’s recent success, now present in more than 80 countries, prompted Hormel Foods to study an expansion of its Spam family product catalog, which should hit shelves in 2023, Snee told the investor conference.