The Dark Truth Behind the Design on Oreo Cookies

[saki]

https://spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/oreo-cookies-design-truth

The Dark Truth Behind the Design on Oreo Cookies
You’ll never see these cookies in the same way ever again.

Nadya Korytnikova
Boston University

facebooktwitterpinterest

An average of 3 billion consumers buy Oreo packages each year, making Oreo the top-selling cookie of the 20th century. But have any of those billions of people ever noticed that they licked off the creamy white filling from the Knight Templar symbol, dipped the Cross Pattee sign into the glass of milk, or satisfied their hunger with the Nabisco logo? Life is just full of surprises.

Here's everything you need to know about the logo on your favorite Oreo cookie.

Cross of Lorraine

Photo courtesy of flickr.com
A circle topped with a two-bar cross is a Nabisco logo that stands for a European symbol of quality. Experts believe the design for the Nabisco symbol arose from the Cross of Lorraine, which was carried by the Knights Templar during the First Crusade in the 11th century. These knights, along with many other Christian pilgrims, went to Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, to recapture it from the Turks who were peacefully living there, whom the Knights mercilessly slaughtered upon their arrival to the city. Dark, dark, history; just like Oreo.

Cross Pattée

Photo courtesy of flickr.com
The geometric pattern of a dot with four triangles radiating outward is a symbol that once again connects Oreos with the history of the First Crusade. It closely resembles a Cross Pattee, a symbol the Knights Temples adopted by sewing the red or black crosses on their white robes and other pieces of clothing to distinguish themselves from soldiers of other religion.

But while some people do recognize this ancient emblem, most consumers see it as a four-leaf clover, with each leaf emphasizing hope, faith, love, and luck. No wonder why the Oreo company has so much luck selling more than 95 million packages each day.

Shape

Photo courtesy of flickr.com
The circle has many mystical meanings including a circle of life, creation, infinity, power, love, and most importantly, change. So, Oreo is not just a tasty round cookie; it is also a friendly reminder that the power of changing your life is all in your hands.

Why "Oreo?"

Photo courtesy of flickr.com
The origin of the name remains a mystery. Some believe that the cookie’s name came from the French word “gold” (doré) because that was the color of the original Oreo package. Others claim that the name is a combination of taking “re” from “cream” and placing it between the two “o”s in “chocolate,” making “o-re-o.”

You can ponder how the Oreo got its catchy name for a very long time, but it’s much better just to grab a whole package of these delicious cookies, take a cup of warm milk, and enjoy a late night snack you deserve. Enjoy.

 

[saki]

....another article on this topic..... Snopes, not surprisingly, calls all this talk of Knights Templars, Cross of Lorraine and Freemasons, etc. a bunch of bunkum.....

The Unsung Heroes of Biscuit Embossing
By NICOLA | Published: JUNE 13, 2011

Over at The New York Times Magazine’s enjoyable 6th Floor blog, Hilary Greenbaum asks “Who made that Oreo emboss?”

IMAGE: Oreo manhole cover, by Andrew Lewicki, an LA-based artist whose work also includes crates of Southern California concrete oranges and a combination ashtray/juicer, for the perfect Parisian breakfast.

Interestingly, when the Oreo was first introduced by Nabisco in 1912, it used a much more organic wreath for its emboss, later augmented with two pairs of turtledoves in a 1924 redesign. The contemporary Oreo stamp was introduced in 1952, and it has remained unchanged, and, in the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger, “the stuff of legend,” ever since.

Writing in 1986, to mark the cookie’s seventy-fifth birthday, Goldberger declared that the Oreo “stands as the archetype of its kind, a reminder that cookies are designed as consciously as buildings, and sometimes better.” Comparing the Oreo to its less successful competitor, the Hydrox, Goldberger notes:

Still, it is the Oreo that has become the icon. And after all, it is the more American-looking of the two — its even pattern, however dowdy, has an industrial, stamped-out quality. It might be said to combine homelike decoration with an American love of machine imagery, and in that combination lies a triumph of design.​

IMAGE: The late, lamented Hydrox cookie, whose pattern is, according to Goldberger, “at once cruder and more delicate than the Oreo’s; the ridges around the edge are longer and deeper, but the center comprises stamped-out flowers, a design more intricate than the Oreo pattern.” Photo via Wikipedia.

However, despite the iconic status of the Oreo emboss today, the identity of its designer remains murky. As Greenbaum reports:

Many Internet resources have credited William Turnier as the man behind the four-leaf clover and serrated-edge design, but Nabisco could confirm only that a man by that name worked for the company during that time as a “design engineer.”​

IMAGE: The evolution of the Oreo emboss, from 1912, to 1924, to today, courtesy Nabisco, via The New York Times.

In reply to Greenbaum’s post, a comment by “Bill,” who claims to be William Turnier’s son, raises the intriguing possibility that the original blueprints for the Oreo emboss may be hanging over the door of a family room in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I hope design museums around America are sharpening their acquisitionary claws.

As it turns out, online Oreo-obsessives have spent as much time decoding the design as they have speculating on the identity of the designer. The circle topped with a two-bar cross in which the word “OREO” resides is a variant of the Nabisco logo, and is either “an early European symbol for quality” (according to Nabisco’s promotional materials) or a Cross of Lorraine, as carried by the Knights Templar into the Crusades. Continuing the Da Vinci Code-theme, the Oreo’s geometric pattern of a dot with four triangles radiating outward is either a schematic drawing of a four-leaf clover or — cue the cliffhanger music from Jaws — the cross pattée, also associated with the Knights Templar, as well as with the German military and today’s Freemasons.

No wonder the Oreo has become the most powerful cookie in the world, with more than 491 billion sold to date.

 

[Noname]

Aside from the Cross of Lorraine, I think that whoever wrote these articles were reading to much into it. Regardless, I never understood why Ore is so popular, it tastes so bad.

 

[saki]

https://spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/oreo-cookies-design-truth

The Dark Truth Behind the Design on Oreo Cookies
You’ll never see these cookies in the same way ever again.

Nadya Korytnikova
Boston University

facebooktwitterpinterestView attachment 21845

An average of 3 billion consumers buy Oreo packages each year, making Oreo the top-selling cookie of the 20th century. But have any of those billions of people ever noticed that they licked off the creamy white filling from the Knight Templar symbol, dipped the Cross Pattee sign into the glass of milk, or satisfied their hunger with the Nabisco logo? Life is just full of surprises.

Here's everything you need to know about the logo on your favorite Oreo cookie.

Cross of Lorraine

Photo courtesy of flickr.com
A circle topped with a two-bar cross is a Nabisco logo that stands for a European symbol of quality. Experts believe the design for the Nabisco symbol arose from the Cross of Lorraine, which was carried by the Knights Templar during the First Crusade in the 11th century. These knights, along with many other Christian pilgrims, went to Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, to recapture it from the Turks who were peacefully living there, whom the Knights mercilessly slaughtered upon their arrival to the city. Dark, dark, history; just like Oreo.

Cross Pattée

Photo courtesy of flickr.com
The geometric pattern of a dot with four triangles radiating outward is a symbol that once again connects Oreos with the history of the First Crusade. It closely resembles a Cross Pattee, a symbol the Knights Temples adopted by sewing the red or black crosses on their white robes and other pieces of clothing to distinguish themselves from soldiers of other religion.

But while some people do recognize this ancient emblem, most consumers see it as a four-leaf clover, with each leaf emphasizing hope, faith, love, and luck. No wonder why the Oreo company has so much luck selling more than 95 million packages each day.

Shape

Photo courtesy of flickr.com
The circle has many mystical meanings including a circle of life, creation, infinity, power, love, and most importantly, change. So, Oreo is not just a tasty round cookie; it is also a friendly reminder that the power of changing your life is all in your hands.

Why "Oreo?"

Photo courtesy of flickr.com
The origin of the name remains a mystery. Some believe that the cookie’s name came from the French word “gold” (doré) because that was the color of the original Oreo package. Others claim that the name is a combination of taking “re” from “cream” and placing it between the two “o”s in “chocolate,” making “o-re-o.”

You can ponder how the Oreo got its catchy name for a very long time, but it’s much better just to grab a whole package of these delicious cookies, take a cup of warm milk, and enjoy a late night snack you deserve. Enjoy.

...speaking of the Cross of Loraine.... I just spotted this one on a TV commercial the other day...
...now that I'm thinking about it... it seems like a rather odd, discordant and glaring usage of an unrelated symbol for an organization which promotes healthy lungs...
...I would think they would select a stylized depiction of human lungs.... or something which signifies their area of concern...(?)...

 

[Diogenes]

Oreo means "beautiful" in Greek. The first letter is a Omega though = Ωραίο (ΩΡΑΙΟ). I'm not sure if they had something like this in mind.

 

[minnie82]

Never eat this cookies, very informative thread