The $3 billion sale of beloved biscuit overlords Arnott’s to quote-unquote “investment powerhouse” KKR this week has caused more than a little consternation for the company’s line of products. All business speculation points to KKR maintaining their usual MO of buying a company, improving its bottom line, and selling it quickly for profit. That has lead to some concern that this “improvement” of the “bottom line” could lead to the demise of some of Arnott’s more unpopular products, like the Orange Slice. I’m here today to let you all know that would be a national tragedy of staggering proportions, and it should not be allowed to happen.
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For starters, the Orange Slice is, easily, the most unfairly maligned biscuit in the history of Australian sweeties. Contrary to what your lying tongues have been paid off to tell you, the Orange Slice is a delicious treat. A citric, buttery tang sandwiched betwixt two delicate, crumbly biscuit halves. It’s a thinking person’s treat. One to savour and contemplate rather than gobble down like some sort of monster, or worse still, turn to mush in a pot of murky lukewarm tea.
In the Arnott’s oeuvre, it is a marvel of biscuit engineering. Not needing to rely on the lazy oaty structure of its much weaker cream compatriots – the Kingston and Monte Carlo are particularly guilty of this shameful trait – and avoiding the pathetic crumb of the shortbread cream which collapses at the sheer whiff of outside air, the Orange Slice stands alone. Strong and mighty, able to maintain its integrity in an unprotected packet, yet delicate enough to provide a smooth, satisfactory chew.
More to that, it is the load-baring peg that holds the Assorted Creams tent aloft.
The Orange Slice is the pack’s measuring stick: It allows the fools who prefer the severely overrated Kingston (awful) or the bafflingly conceived Monte Carlo (yucky red bullshit) to feel erroneously superior. It gives those blind to its brilliance something to mindlessly gab about. And it gives the special few chosen by the Slice the ability to enter a house with an Assorted Cream packet in it and be safe in the knowledge that there’s a full sleeve of tasty joy waiting for them and them alone.
The Orange Slice is Australia, in essence: Morphed from something painfully British into a bastard object unto itself. Maligned. Joked about. A little on the burnt side. Probably forged on racially-tinged pretences.
Its demise cannot, and should not, be tolerated. It is the King of biscuits, and I’ll hear no other arguments.
