Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Chocolate-Covered Rice Cakes

In terms of taste, rice cakes offer the least amount of excitement among any snack. Usually rice cakes taste very much like a combination of bland white rice and cardboard. Their nutritional impact is minimal as rice cakes serve a purely utilitarian purpose, to satiate without fattening.

But today, for the first time, I tried chocolate covered rice cakes: Quaker Rice Cakes Chocolate Crunch. I was very pleasantly surprised. Although the amount of added chocolate is quite small, the overall experience is many times better. The improved taste combined with the traditional fulfillment turned rice cakes into a pretty good product.

Since rice cakes have been around for years, it's amazing that I haven't seen this variety in the past - although apparently the added flavors have been around for awhile as well. This little treat points out that a slight change can have a disproportionate impact on an old product or service - in the case of rice cakes, it has prolonged and enhanced the existence of a food-type that would have probably been extinct by now. This is what Twitter might do to SMS. This is what Gmail might do to email. This is something that offers countless opportunities for those willing to recognize and improve products that most overlook.
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