Hearne: Iconic KC Cookie Back to Fight Wokeism

The last two years were so intense, tons of stuff fell between the cracks…

For example, the once beloved Aunt Jemima bit the dust last summer, a victim of wokeness and the Black Lives Matter fad.

Did you notice?

I didn’t until my wife asked me to pick up some frozen Aunt Jemima pancakes recently.

Hold it, Aunt who?

Turns out what she really meant was for me to get some Pearl Milling Company pancakes. A web search later, I figured it out.

Just one problem…

In the wilds of Tucson, nobody seems to carry frozen Pearl Milling Company products. They do have some syrups and dry pancake mixes, but until now, even those never jumped out at me.

So just like that, with the local and national media demonizing Donald Trump, forcing folks to get vaccinated, wear purposeless cloth masks and helping raise to millions for BLM, dear, sweet Aunt Jemima went for a dirt nap.

In the meantime, BLM appears to have squandered all those tis of millions of dollars with little to no accounting. All while a pillar of pop culture died and nobody – including the ancestors of the original Aunt Jemima – had a clue as to what happened.

But set aside the never ending story of racism briefly, and let’s look at another famous brand from my lost childhood that went away long ago – one with powerful Kansas City roots – Hydrox Cookies.

For the uninitiated – and there are likely many of you – Hydrox invented what later became the Original Oreo cookie. Famous Kansas City icon Jacob L. Loose introduced and manufactured it, four years before Oreo copied it then left Hysdrox in the dust with better marketing of an arguably an inferior product.

Yep, Jacob Loose – of Loose Park fame – the guy who apparently never owned slaves or championed racism, started the endowment fund for Children’s Mercy Hospital and helped launch the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation –  and built and ran what became KC’s Sunshine Bakery. 

So it was KC’s Loose introduced the world’s most popular cookie.

Mind you, that was four years before Oreo copy catted it, or as Oreo’s Wikipedia page puts it, launched “an imitation of the Hydrox cookie manufactured by Sunshine company.”

Now flash forward to the present…

Hydrox is back and available on Amazon, at Cracker Barrel and other retailers, but not yet on a widespread basis. I went to a grocery in Tucson yesterday and Oreo’s dwarfed the entire cookie section.

That said, on a far smaller scale, Hyrdox is taking advantage of a few lesser known details about Oreos, including its new, woke LGTBQ + leanings, laying off workers here and moving much of its production to Mexico, and making Hydrox without trans fats, high fructose corn syrup and artificial flavors and colors.

Plus Hydrox is  made with cane sugar with natural vanilla flavor.

Quaint, right?

That Hydrox was born and bred in KC may explain how I grew up with it more than Oreo. But in my adulthood, until now, I never gave much thought to what happened to Hydrox, the name of which is a mix of Hydrogen and Oxegon. Go figure.

Still, it’s kind of a cool story about the dude behind Loose Park that I grew up across the street from.

Turns out, when Jacob Loose built his Hydrox factory in KC, “Believing sunshine was healthful for workers the plant “was built with many windows and they named the crackers and biscuits that were produced there ‘Sunshine Biscuits’ (and) the name caught on,” says the History Press Charleston, South Carolina.

So knock yourselves out, boys and girls (no offense to Walt Disney) and try the original, slightly more healthy chocolate sandwich cookie and take a trip  back in time with me to Kansas City’s  culinary past!