BY JOEY SWEENEY

We, every one of us who buys a thing or scrolls past a thing, are living in the age of the collab. People did things together before this, surely they did; but the collab is the kind of doing-things-together thing that is more there to boost the signals of the two or more parties involved — that is, to show to others — than it is for good old togetherness, which was about showing things to each other. 

Don’t get me wrong, though. There’s no morality attached to any of this. In fact, collabs can be really good (although we should admit that the word, or part of a word, is not great, and will not get any better). 

It is in this context that I would like to discuss a product that sits on my desk right now: a bag of GoPuff/Andy Capp’s Fully Baked Hot Munchies, a collab (ugh) between GoPuff, the Philly startup that mixes the delivery of beer, ice cream, and rolling papers with a certain Axe Body Spray charm, and the Andy Capp brand of hot fries, which are made from degermed corn meal, milk, and chemicals.

There is much to unpack here: Firstly, they are delicious and addictive and quite possibly the only thing worth remembering from high school. More on this in a moment. Secondly: You ever actually read an Andy Capp comic? It’s essentially the equivalent of a British kitchen-sink drama from the early 1960s, but in comic strip form. Andy is on the dole, he’s loaded all of the time, and he is often seen trying unsuccessfully to cheat on his wife, whom, as it happens, he beat regularly for decades. I get why there got to be a line of what the Brits would call crisps in his name, but what I will never get is how they (and he) have lasted this long and how they wound up being undeniable to my terrible, terrible mouth.

Finally, there’s the GoPuff piece of this: That such an odd old brand as Andy Capp would take off with the quickly ascendant GoPuff might be the weirdest of all. We can credit not just GoPuff but also weed for this. Andy' Capp’s (original) Hot Fries had been so popular on the service that Capp’s parent company, Conagra Brands, saw fit to create the collab, launching it around April 20th earlier this year. The resulting “Fully Baked” version of the Hot Fries are utterly no different from the originals in way that I can discern except, fittingly, for the bag. 

Which is to say, they are perfect.