Prongles

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Part of a series on Cards Against Humanity. [View Related Entries]

About

Prongles are a type of potato chip created by the people behind the popular card game Cards Against Humanity. The chips are made in parody of Pringles potato chips as well as cartoon mascots for food products marketed towards children in the 1990s. Initially, it was unclear who created the product until several Reddit users tracked down Cards Against Humanity by examining the product's packaging.

Origin

The product began appearing in Target stores around mid-November, 2017. One of the earliest Reddit posts to document Prongles was posted to /r/crappyoffbrands on November 14th, 2017,^[1] where it gained over 250 points (shown below).

Spread

On November 16th, in a thread on /r/holidaybullshit,^[2] Redditor DaveLambert uploaded several pictures to Imgur^[3] in which he documented his process investigating the origin of Prongles. He recognized the chip can rang up as "CAH Card Game" and that the can beneath the label was of "The Good Crisp Company," suggesting the Prongles cans were repackaged. By searching a code, he was led to OriginalProngles.net,^[8] and by searching that domain on gandi.net, he confirmed that that the site was registered to Cards Against Humanity LLC.

On November 21st, the product began going viral on Twitter following a tweet by @katangus^[4] showcasing the chips, gaining over 26,000 retweets and 73,000 likes (shown below).

The viral tweet led to media attention. Grubstreet^[5] covered the Reddit threads first, followed by Uproxx^[6] and Mashable.^[7] Within a few days many major media news sites wrote about it including, Today.com,^[10] Adweek,^[11] Foxnews,^[12] Cheezburger,^[15] Cosmopolitan,^[13] and even Russian language sites were fascinated such as Lenta.^[14] Media outlets in England and Ireland wrote up about Prongles but failed to grasp that it was a publicity stunt, such as The Sun^[16] and The Irish Examiner.^[17] Fans noticed the brand's parody of Pringles' slogan "Once you pop the fun don't stop," as the slogan for Prongles is "Once you pop… that's great!" On November 24th, the OriginalProngles site launched.^[9] On the Original Prongles website, a song plays in the style of 90s hip-hop jingles for kids food products like Reese's Puffs (shown below).