You'll never guess

July 17, 2009

The other day I was working away and I get a somewhat cryptic email from my wife letting me know that I'll never guess what she'd just found at Albertsons (a supermarket for those non-Californians out there) in Vista. The one on Melrose Drive if you're a Kiwi living nearby and want to get some...

She then proceeded to give me a couple of hints, neither of which really helped. The first was that it was something she never expected to see here in America, and the second was that the address of the manufacturer contains the words "East Tamaki".

Now this was puzzling, and since I grew up near East Tamaki and knew it as full of all manner of business, I thought, well it could be anything. So I started to narrow it down a bit in my mind. I decided it couldn't be Vegemite since you can already get that here, and besides, that's Australian and made in Australia. It also couldn't be Marmite since we already get Marmite imported from England here. So what about Pies!! Meat Pies!! My mind immediately filled with thoughts of wonderful and delicious meat filled hand holdable pies and promptly forgot that you can get meat pies at English Grocers here in Southern California if you are lucky enough to live near one. I don't. So Pies was wrong.

You'll need to be a Kiwi to guess what it was. And no, it wasn't L&P. It was Hokey Pokey Ice Cream! How amazing is that! So I tucked into some Hokey Pokey Ice Cream for desert for the first time since last February when we were last in New Zealand for a month.

It was pretty good hokey pokey too I must say.

So there you have it. Some things you'd never expect to be exported, even though there's no reason they couldn't be successful overseas, finally do get exported.

We'll have to make sure Albertsons knows how much little things like that are appreciated.