Don't Mess With the Sauce!

Dear Chef Boyardee People:

I have happily used your pizza sauce for YEARS because I like it. A lot. It brings back happy memories of my childhood and pizzas made at home in bygone years, and I’ve been pleased to share those memories by bringing them forward and baking pizzas with your delicious sauce for my own children. We pretty much all agree that when we are craving homemade pizza, it is the sauce we are remembering fondly.

However, imagine my dismay when shopping at my local grocery store this week and there were no cans of delicious Chef Boyardee pizza sauce on the shelf where until a few days ago it happily was always to be found. Not to be deterred, I opted to buy the Chef Boyardee Pizza Maker kit, because I knew the sauce is contained in that box. All seemed well and good until I went to make my pizzas tonight, a joyous Friday tradition in the Sweet Tea household. When I opened the can of “Pizza Maker Sauce”, the name of which probably should have clued me in, I realized it didn’t smell exactly right. I thought, “No, surely they didn’t....” and proceeded to swipe a taste on my finger from the lid. 

You did. You went and changed my sauce.

Why, I ask you, did you take something that has been providing deliciousness for years, and go about changing it? And you know what? I don’t like the new flavor nearly as well. It doesn’t have that special something that was in the old sauce, and has a new something that I just really don't like.

Why go about changing a good thing? Do you remember the “New Coke” debacle? I do. Didn't turn out so well, and when they brought back "Coke Classic," it still wasn't the same Coca-Cola we had known and loved, but apparently they thought we were too dumb to notice, and now my kids have no idea what once was. Well, now I find myself unwittingly in the midst of a pizza sauce debacle, and I am sad. I am letting you know that there is now nothing to prevent me from leaving your trusted brand and embarking on a journey to find a new favorite elsewhere. Sadly, my Chef Boyardee sauce seems to be going the way of so many other old favorite items that have left us for the land of “new and improved” which is usually none of the sort.

I will eat my pizza tonight with some sadness and nostalgia for what was, and hope that perhaps this sauce change is a fluke or something. 

If it is not, then I am sad to say that I see no reason to continue what has been a happy friendship for so many years. 

Sadly,

Rebekah

Chief pizza maker and cook in the Sweet Tea household