Jack was almost happy with his job at the cracker factory. As with any manufacturing job he got a healthy supply of the featured product. He, more than most people, took full advantage of his allowance, frequently bringing home large bags of cosmetic rejects and malformed opening and closing batches.
He would enjoy them with jam, honey, marmalade, peanut butter, yeast extract, chocolate spread and anything else he had on hand. Like his job, he was almost happy with the results. Something was missing though, and he asked for a few shifts in the mixing room to perform some quiet experiments.
Normally management wouldn’t allow for any deviation from the formulations, but Jack was careful to keep his mixes off the production line. He’d take the bags of dough home, and finish making the crackers himself.
His main thought was to substitute the plain salt for subtle herb blend. It wasn’t much, and he could hardly taste the difference himself, but something it the texture just worked better. The crackers didn’t break the same way and certain toppings seemed to highlight a different part of the concoction.
He quietly tried a taste test at work, but his colleagues always defaulted to the normal batch. Not that they disliked the new variation, but they were the kind of people who liked monotony. Or so Jack reasoned.
He approached R&D and they said they would consider it. Which, as Jack found out, was just a quiet way of saying ‘No’.
Months passed and he never quite gave up on his recipe. Then one night, the auto mixers were down, and the company still wanted to continue production.
Normally Jack wouldn’t have done anything so presumptuous, but he had become convinced his crackers would be a breakthough for the company. He quietly added the extra herbs and got the new batches made.
No one noticed anything. That was the problem. Most people didn’t eat as many crackers at Jack. They didn’t zero in on the flavour profile. They didn’t taste the changes, at all.
Jack had successfully gotten out twelve full pallets of his recipe and nothing happened.
Then one day he was asked to come to the mail department. A letter had arrived, commented on a specific batch at a specific time, and the company had traced it back to Jack’s shift.
It read: Thank you very much for the special crackers. I really loved the extra herbs. Could you please make more of them?
Signed Alice Sweet Age 9.
30 years later she ended up owning the company and changing the recipe. Still, no one noticed, but an older Jack, sitting quietly in a retirement home, eating the best crackers he had ever tasted.
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