A decade and a half ago, I expressed my distaste for vacuum-sealed shelf-stable salsa. As I noted at the time, if you’re in a grocery store, there is almost certainly fresh-made salsa a few aisles over. It’s similarly priced, but a vastly superior product.
In addition to its middling flavor and gloppy consistency, unrefrigerated salsa has another downside: it comes in a glass jar. As folks in the nearby town of Needham recently learned, that can lead to very costly problems. There, a shattered glass jar of salsa caused one of their public pools had to be closed for four days in the heart of summer. Worse, clean-up costs were around $20,000, as the pool was completely drained and re-filled. From Park and Recreation Director Stacey Mulroy1:
“The problem is when it smashes, it’s glass shards, and the glass shards are what we are concerned about,” she said. And the danger is not just that they will cut someone’s foot. “They can float into somebody’s eye or somebody’s mouth or into their lungs if they ingest shards of glass. That is a more concerning situation, which is why we go through this very specific procedure.”
Grimace H. Christ, glass shards floating into somebody’s eye! I apologize for this hideous new fear we must now all share.
After hearing about Needham’s unfortunate occurrence, I noted that this all could have been avoided if the perpetrator had exercised better judgement, particularly in their purchasing decisions. I’m a long-time fan of Mitchell’s Fresh, a salsa company based here in New England. Their salsa is delicious, and in their words, it’s made “using only the finest and freshest ingredients”. Notably, it comes in a pool-friendly plastic tub.
That also led me to think about a potential marketing coup. A few years back, Coinstar knew when to pounce on some inexpensive publicity, and I realized that my favorite salsa company might be able to so as well. Thus, I sent an unsolicited email to Mitchell’s Fresh, suggesting they might offer to cover Needham’s clean-up costs in the name of good publicity. It seemed like the kind of story that could well go viral. If nothing else, I figured the idea might give their communications team a good laugh.
Sadly, despite their email address being prominently featured on the Mitchell’s website, my message has twice bounced back to me. I assume it is unread, and it is thus unlikely we’ll see a headline like: “Mitchell’s Fresh Salsa Pays for Pool Cleanup Necessitated by Inferior Rival”. At least we can enjoy the idea together.
Footnotes:
Though Needham has plural parks, Mulroy’s title (and indeed, the department) does indeed use a singular “Park”, not “Parks and Recreation”. ↩︎
