More than twenty-five years ago, in 1974, when Steve Martin of Martin Food Brokerage, Redmond, Washington, was a food broker for Brown-Massie, he constructed the world's largest display of Cracker Jack boxes in a Treasury store in Santa Ana, California. It was somewhat in the shape of a pyramid and made up of 525 cases of 72 3-pack boxes.

How many boxes: 525 x 72 x 3 = ?

If your answer is 113,400 boxes of Cracker Jack, that's right! At 1 ounce per box, they would have weighed 7,087.5 pounds--more than 2 1/2 tons! And if only five peanuts were in each box (a conservative estimate), there would have been well over half a million of them! Wow! And just think of all the Cracker Jack prizes in those boxes!

Having read in a Borden sales newsletter that the record Cracker Jack display up until then had been made of 500 cases, Steve was inspired to beat that record--and did.

Steve's feat was reported in some trade magazines and also in the Borden newsletter. (Borden was the owner of Cracker Jack at the time.) That display apparently contained more Cracker Jack boxes than any ever built before or since.

 

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© Jim Davis 5/18/99