Combo Platter

Drilling holes in pretzels: The forgotten Battle Creek company that eventually nailed Combos

There hasn’t exactly been many dedicated tomes written on the history of Combos, a food that isn’t the main entree on any normal person’s plate. It’s mass-manufactured snack food, and it’s been produced by one of the world’s largest food companies, Mars, since the late 1970s.

But there was a time when it was thought to require a literal drill to produce. Yes, the signature hole that makes Combos unlike any food on grocery store shelves was originally produced with a drill. The overworked Dunkin’ guy says “time to make the donuts” as a camera crew catches his every move. The overworked Combos guy says “time to drill the pretzels,” as he takes a pretzel and cores it like a freaking apple.

OK, I’m getting ahead of myself here, but I needed you to know about the drill thing, because it really just highlights how strange producing a food like Combos really is.

The story of Combos starts with a pair of brothers, Richard and Walter Nelson. The brothers, based in Battle Creek, Michigan, were active entrepreneurs starting in the 1950s, when, with their father Walter Sr., they launched Wal-Rich Enterprises, which made toy guns, at Kellogg Field, a modern-day corporate airport that was used as a training base during World War II.

By the 1970s, the brothers had shifted to contract work for various manufacturers, including General Motors and nearby Kellogg’s. But gradually, the brothers, now working under the Nelbros umbrella, started developing the patents for an unusual product: A pretzel filled with cheese. The first such patent filing, 1970s’s “Method of making a filled food item,” describes an attempt to solve the problem of putting a filling inside a fairly solid product, like a cracker:

It is well-known practice to pierce a food item having a relatively open and porous interior, such as a cream puff or doughnut of pillow shape, and directly inject into such food item through the piercing member, a thick but flowable filling such as whipped cream, custard, fruit preserves, and jelly. The filling of hollow ice cream conetype items by various filling procedures, such as with soft ice creamlike material flowing from a faucet has also been proposed. Such procedures do not lend themselves to the filling of relatively solid items, and especially the solid and relatively brittle, sticklike, hard-crust items, and it was a recognition of the marketing possibilities of such items and a special method and apparatus for producing them, not commercially available, which led to the conception and development of the present invention.

Accordingly, among the objects of the present invention is the provision of a new product in the form of an initially solid, relatively brittle, sticklike, crust-covered product which has been subsequently mechanically hollowed and filled with a suitable filler, and the method and apparatus for producing such product.

Their solution to this problem they’ve found? Drill baby, drill:

Another object of this invention is to provide an apparatus which will cut a bread stick to length, drill it substantially from the cut end to the other, fill same from the inside of said drilled opening, starting adjacent the bottom of same, with a suitable thick but extrudable filling material, and deliver same for further processing, using or packaging.

If you’re a longtime reader of Tedium, you may know that this is kind of a wasteful process for producing a snack. The best snacks, such as cheese curls, come about because of happy accidents and byproducts. But this drilled-breadstick approach nonetheless was enough for Nelbros to launch this idea into a sellable product, which they, of course, called … shotzels.

I’m not saying that it’s a bad name, but it certainly wasn’t good enough to win over the gas stations of the world. I was trying to figure out just how far idea of a cheese-filled pretzel shotzel reached beyond Battle Creek, and I found a lot of newspaper ads that suggest the company saw uptake for the product at a number of small delis around the country.

How far did the shotzel get in Battle Creek? One of the few references I could find to shotzels in the city’s newspaper emerged around 1977 when it was promoted as one of the appetizers made available before a concert by the Battle Creek Symphony Orchestra. Combos may be low culture, but shotzels were apparently a hit with the city’s NPR crowd.

Around this time, Nelbros was struggling with its factory situation, attempting to move facilities as it navigated a growing business. A 1978 article described a company in flux, along with a few others who were moving into a then-new industrial park.

“It will take about six months to complete the building and get equipment in. We’re planning a 60,000-square-foot building that will accommodate a new 300-foot oven we have on order,” Richard Nelson told the newspaper. “We’ve outgrown our plant at Green and Jay streets and must relocate to expand.”

Meanwhile, the brothers were continuing to develop the shotzel idea into something plainly recognizable to any modern snackhound. The strategy, as highlighted by a patent published in 1979: Get rid of the drilling.

The objects of the invention are accomplished by apparatus and a method for making tubular food products wherein dough pieces in tubular shape are extruded onto supporting die members that hold the tubular dough piece during the time that it is raising and is being baked. Thereafter, the baked member is removed from the die member and is moved relative to a filling apparatus so that filler of a relatively softer food material can be deposited within the cavity formed in the baked tubular member. In one embodiment of the invention the supporting die members are transferred from separated conveyors for extruding, proofing, cooking and baking.

Eseentially, rather than creating a single pretzel, filling it with cheese and cutting it up, this edition of the shotzel instead extrudes the bread onto tiny loops that already have holes in the middle, ensuring that they can easily be stuffed with cheese or some other kind of filling.

Naturally, the candy manufacturing giant Mars got wind of this development, acquired it from Nelbros in 1979, gave it a name better than “shotzel,” and marketed it in gas stations nationwide. The rest is history.

It’s so weird to me that there were no non-pretzel flavors of Combos for the first few years of its existence. Also, this ad screams “we don’t understand our target audience yet, so let’s aim super-broad.”

The 2006 Combos marketing campaign that didn’t age particularly well

Combos are not really a product that needs advertising so much as distribution. They exist in a 7-Eleven. You pick them up instead of a bag of Bugles, and you’re on your way. Road trip commences.

But that hasn’t stopped Mars from trying to market these things on television. The first such attempt came in 1982 in a format I’d call “Big Red”-core. It leaned heavily on the pretzel inspiration, rather than its bite-sized nature, which was really the selling point that mattered.

But despite their lasting popularity, Combos have never been a favorite of advertisers. There’s not really a “Combos jingle” that people associate with the company. That meant that, when advertisers took steps to attempt to explain the appeal of Combos, they did so with the then-current language of hipness. This 1994 Combos ad, clearly riffing off of Bill Hicks and his close copycat Denis Leary, emphasizes the point. (At least it talks about the product!)

Beyond quirky ad campaigns like the mid-1990s Combo Man comic-book campaign with Marvel, nothing seemed to really stick to the brand culturally.

Which meant that in the mid-2000s, when cable channels like Adult Swim and Spike TV were specifically targeting young men, Combos was something of an open canvas upon which big advertising firms could place their imprint.

And given our cultural evolution since, it reads as particularly gnarly. The slogan says what they were going for: “What Your Mom Would Feed You If Your Mom Were A Man.”

Basically, they got someone who looks very much like a man (played by E.J. Carroll, best known for a recurring role on the HBO show The Deuce), put him in a dress, and gave him some clearly adult sons. The visual effect comes off somewhat like John Carroll Lynch’s cross-dressing character in The Drew Carey Show, without the ahead-of-its-time progressive elements that eventually (and unfortunately) led that story line to be dropped.

The ads were designed for maximum absurdity (giving Combos to a sick son, saying grace over a bag of Combos), and to hit you with that in-your-face slogan right at the end. We’re a long way from handing these things out at the Battle Creek Symphony Orchestra.

It was the brainchild of TBWA\Chiat\Day, the firm famed for much of Apple’s iconic advertising, most notably its then-recent “Get A Mac” campaign. And the campaign even won awards for its radio advertising.

In an era when at least some have questioned whether late character actor Tim Curry’s career-making role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show is transphobic, even considering that film’s lasting relevance with the LGBTQ+ community, the ad hits a lot differently today. Less Tim & Eric fodder, more extremely misguided attempt at making a gender-role joke.

I get that some will probably defend this ad campaign, but it just feels like it would have worked just as well without putting E.J. Carroll in a dress. Mr. Mom never had to pull the gender reversal to make effectively the same joke. And other media properties that did lean into cross-dressing, such as Mrs. Doubtfire and Kids in the Hall, at least set up a framework for why the gender reversal was happening. The joke in this specific campaign was crass even then, but now it just feels gratuitous.

You might be wondering, did Combos do better later on? Arguably, yes, though still attempting to present these gas station standbys in a way that appealed to the Slim Jims crowd. A 2012-era ad campaign, called “Bad Combos,” instead leaned into absurd “bad combination” situations. (This “witch doctor” variation is also fairly edgy.)

That may be the its sweet spot from a marketing standpoint. It was ground the brand mined in the early ’90s as well.

Was this the right approach for Combos’ target audience of people who just got gas at a place they’ll never visit again? Who’s to say. But it’s telling that I can’t seem to find any recent examples of Combos ads that appeared on television. The Instagram account that gets updated a few times a year is probably enough.

Honestly, they sell themselves—without the transphobic tropes.