fucking bacon

A crack salesman and noted gourmand returned to his desk with a man-sized lunch of fish 'n' chips. A big fan of generous portions of both salt and vinegar on his chips, he nevertheless lamented how soggy that latter condiment had made his meal.

"What I need," he mused, "is a dry mixture of salt and vinegar."

"Like vinegar flavoured salt?" asked a colleague.

"Yeah," came the reply, muffled by a mouthful of damp chips.

Then a light bulb appeared above the salesman's head. "I should make that," he exclaimed. "That's a cracking business idea. The market for that would be huge. Loads of people like the taste of vinegar but don't want soggy chips."

"I hate to break it to you," another colleague chipped in, "but it already exists. It took me about ten seconds to find it online."

Malt Salt, it turns out, is just one of a number of products developed by the seasoning geniuses of J&D's Foods of Seattle, Washington, USA - and the vinegar-flavoured condiment, by dint of not tasting of bacon, is not really part of the firm's core range. Founders Justin Esch and Dave Lefkow, after all, have developed an obsession for the taste of bacon and have gone on a mission to find ever weirder applications for the uniquely distinctive flavour of the cured pig meat. Often without actually using real bacon, it should be stressed. Some of J&D's products are, incredibly, even certified as Kosher.

The pair started out with just $5000 that Lefkow had won by submitting a winning entry to America's Funniest Home Videos. The bar must have been set pretty low for that particular episode of the show because Lefkow's clip of his son knocking a baseball at him is not exactly a rib-tickler.

From these humble beginnings, the self-styled Bacontrepreneurs have built an empire founded on the strong sales of Bacon Salt (bacon-flavoured powdered condiment) and whose range now includes:

• Baconnaise - bacon-flavoured mayonnaise
• Bacon Pop - bacon-flavoured popcorn
• bacon-flavoured croutons
• bacon-flavoured gravy

But these are the more pedestrian examples of working to realise the vision expressed in the company's slogan (Everything should taste like bacon). When really thinking out of the box, Esch and Lefkow have come up with truly outré offerings. These include:

• Mmmvelopes - envelopes with bacon-flavoured glue
• bacon-flavoured lip balm
• Bacon Lube - a bacon flavoured/scented massage oil and 'personal lubricant'

The last item in the list is real. Really real. What next? Bacon-scented anal beads? Bacon-scented condoms? Bring it on.