As many of you know, I have a longstanding fascination with bread clips (or, as they’re officially known, Kwik Loks). So you can imagine how I felt when IC reader David Chelsea, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, recently contacted me with the following message:
I have this vague childhood memory — this would have been around 1968 — of a local brand of sliced bread with a name like Animal Farm, which was advertised with animated commercials featuring a cast of barnyard animals — chickens, pigs, cows, and the like. But as I recall it, there was also one non-animal character: “Kwikky Kwik Lok,” who was a cartoon bread clip.
I realized that this could make me sound delusional, so I appealed for help on a Portland-centric Facebook group, and someone came back with this:
It seems Kwikky is the farmer, and the brand was called Funny Farm (not Animal Farm, as I had recalled). This brand was sold at Fred Meyer, a local grocery chain in Portland. The Kwik Lok connection is an unusual bit of corporate synergy, but Kwik Lok is based in Yakima, Washington, not far from Portland, so it makes a kind of sense.
Whoa — a bread wrapper design featuring an anthropomorphized bread tag! How great is that? And how had I never been aware of it until now? (Obviously, the “Funny Farm” brand name is unfortunate, but we already knew that the late 1960s weren’t exactly the most enlightened era regarding mental illness.)
The image that David shared with me looked like it had been taken from a newspaper ad, so I went to newspapers.com and was able to find the full, uncropped version of the Fred Meyer ad, which ran in an Oregon newspaper called The Statesman Journal on April 30th, 1969: