Humans, of course, are known for our hubris, doomed to be struck down by the Gods. This, perhaps, is why a new brand seeks to disrupt Uncrustables’ ubiquity in the “sealed crustless sandwich” space. Jams is a professional athlete-backed Uncrustables dupe that’s now in the process of hitting Walmart stores across the country, as CNBC Sport reported earlier this week. The packaged “protein PB&J”comes in either strawberry or blueberry.
As founder Connor Blakely told CNBC, the biggest selling point of Jams is its lack of seed oils, dyes, artificial colors and flavors, and high fructose corn syrup, in addition to having the “most protein per ounce of any peanut butter and jelly that’s currently on the market.”
I do have to wonder: Do we really need a protein Uncrustable? Especially when peanut butter and jelly Uncrustables already have protein by virtue of having peanut butter? Sure, a Jams sandwich has 10 grams of protein to the six in an Uncrustable, but a Jams sandwich weighs in at 74 grams and an Uncrustable is only 58 grams. That’s 13 percent protein to 10 percent protein — not a startlingly huge difference. Then again, it’s true that I’m not an athlete. NFL teams, for whom macros likely matter much more than they do for me, go through at least 80,000 Uncrustables per year, as The Athletic uncovered last year.
What bothers me more than the protein marketing is the way this “health-conscious” branding, employed by so many new food brands now, draws on our collective anxiety around food. While some of this anxiety is well-earned, it’s also been exploited by brands whose positioning can often read like fearmongering. New oil companies deride the inflammatory potential of their competitors; probiotic sodas promise to solve problems we might never have had, had we not suddenly become inundated with “gut health” content on TikTok.
This has contributed to the rise of the Make America Healthy Again movement, with both its accurate guidance, like eating more vegetables, and its more potentially worrying elements, like the rise of raw milk and the recent backlash against food dye. I was alive during the Atkins era and therefore know that none of this — the demonization of specific ingredients, the overemphasis on others — is anything new. But it’s all starting to feel a little orthorexic, don’t we think?
Despite Jams’s branding, Uncrustables already don’t have any artificial dyes, as CNBC notes, nor do they contain high fructose corn syrup; it removed the latter in favor of real sugar in 2017. That’s the appeal of this kind of marketing, though: It taps into our anxieties, whether they’re justified or not.
