But it tastes like cardboard

Sometimes real life just writes the story. Two examples hit me this week.

On the inspirational side, I went to the Regent Theatre last Thursday aftenoon to see Searching for Sugarman. It’s a documentary (the first in a new weekly Cinefest series) about the Detroit musician Sixto Rodriguez, who recorded two flop albums in the early 1970s. Unbeknownst to him, he had become “more popular than Elvis” among Afrikaaner South Africans , who in turn thought him dead. More than 25 years later, the two discover one another and are fulfilled. You couldn’t make up a much better fairy story if you tried.

And then there’s the more prosaic story of Cheetos. Cheetos are a puffed cornmeal cheese-flavoured product made in the United States. They were invented in 1948 by Charles Elmer Doolin, who also invented the famous Frito chip. Cheetos and Fritos joined forces with H.W. Lay & Company in 1961; that company, Frito-Lay, then became a subsidiary of PepsiCo in 1961.

Cheetos are the topselling cheese puffs in the U.S., where annual sales are about $4 billion. Cheetos, as you probably know, are sold in Canada too.

And therein lies the problem. Between 2003 and 2006, Frito- Lay labelled several shipments of Cheetos coming into Canada as “cardboard boxes,” when they should have been more accurately labelled “crisp savoury snacks.” According to the company, this was a clerical mistake and not some rogue employee’s way of commenting on the quality of the company’s product. Cardboard comes into Canada duty free, by Canada’s own rules. So too do crisp savoury snacks, but under the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In 2007, Frito-Lay caught its mistake and applied for a retroactive reclassification, figuring it was academic. Not so fast, said the Canadian Border Services Agency. The terms of NAFTA only permit you to go back one year to claim duty exemptions. So instead it applied, retroactively, the tariff applicable to crisp savoury snacks imported from non-NAFTA countries, which amounts to a whopping 11 per cent.

Five years later, the Canadian International Trade Tribunal is not amused and tells the Canadian Border Services Agency to give Frito-Lay all its money back. The lawyer for Frito-Lay describes the whole debacle as “Kafkaesque.”

All of which does raise a few questions. First, might Frito-Lay have been better off to say “well, these things taste like cardboard, so let’s just keep calling them cardboard”? Second, how many more misclassifications are out there; for example, is someone importing weiners into the country and avoiding tariffs by classifying them as “edible rubber product” instead of “barely edible animal byproduct”? And third—and here I acknowledge the inspiration of conspiracy theorists—was this all a brave Canadian attempt to shore up the Hawkins Cheezie, made just up the road from us in Belleville?

The Hawkins Cheezie was invented at about the same time as the Cheeto by two Chicago men, James Marker and W.T. Hawkins, who discovered a way to extrude cornmeal into bite-sized pieces, and cover it with real cheddar cheese. Production started in Tweed, Ontario in 1949 and has been going on in Belleville since 1956. The company is currently headed by Mr. Hawkins’s grandson Kent Hawkins. But Hawkins Cheezies are not sold in the United States, which makes one suspicious that U.S. border agencies might be threatening some sort of reverse reprisal, levying a tax on the Cheezie as a “wholesome cheese product” instead of lettting it in to the country duty-free as a “crisp savoury snack.”

I called Tony McGarvey, the Director of Finance at Cheezies, to run my questions by him. Ever the company loyalist, he opined that the Border Services Agency “probably got it right the first time.” And let me say this about that. I have tasted Hawkins Cheezies. Hawkins Cheezies are my friends. Mr. Cheeto, you’re no Hawkins Cheezie. Check the sideby- side Internet comparisons for yourself.

The Hawkins Cheezie, as Mr. McGarvey points out to me, is a Canadian icon and Canadiana Dictionary Official Word. It is happy in its own skin, so to speak, and doesn’t care to market itself in the U.S. If it did, it wouldn’t need inside subterfuge to help. All of which doesn’t change the fact that Frito-Lay, as part of the PepsiCo behemoth, has much more money to put into advertising and store shelf space than does Cheezies.

With reluctance, I must dismiss both the conspiracy and reverse reprisal theories. Bureaucratic intransigence is a much more banal and therefore more likely explanation. So this fiasco has in the end been brought to you by the Canadian taxpayer, who has been funding this drawn out dispute for the past nine years.

Let the culprits eat cardboard, and have them think they’re eating Cheetos.

Those of you who read this column closely will note the irony in the fact that the NHL lockout ended on the very day that Season Three of Downton Abbey was broadcast. The planets are back in alignment.

David Simmonds’s writing is also available at www.grubstreet.ca.