How does the world love SPAM? Let us count the ways.

Tuesday, May 09, 2000

How does the world love SPAM? Let us count the ways.

The world’s most famous luncheon meet has a fan club.

It has its own Web site: www.spam.com.

It has its own gift catalog.

The SPAM can is in both the Smithsonian Institute’s museum and the Library of Congress.

Sometime next year, Hormel Foods Corp. will open a new SPAM Museum in the one-and-only SPAMTOWN USA, Austin.

The six-billionth can of SPAM will be filled at the company’s flagship Austin plant in 2002.

And now, SPAM has its own Minnesota State Lottery instant scratch game.

Beginning May 30, the SPAM game card will debut. For $2 a card, players will have the opportunity to win up to $25,000.

John Mellein is the sales and marketing director for the Minnesota State Lottery. He’s also a former Hormel Foods sales executive and product manager.

"We’re just cookin’ it and it’s just about ready for the end of the line," Mellein, who couldn’t resist "talkin’ Hormel" in explaining where the new game is at.

According to Mellein, "There is a trend nationally for co-partnerships between companies and their products to link up with state lotteries.

"For us, the Minnesota State Lottery, it’s a strategic opportunity to add focus and fun to a game and that, in turn, becomes an added value for the game and for the company."

But Mellein did not conceive the Minnesota State Lottery and Hormel Foods partnership. That bit of creativity came from elsewhere.

Just who’s idea was this? Answer: V. Allan Krejci, Hormel Foods’ vice president for public relations. That’s who.

"We’ve been working with the Minnesota State Lottery since last fall to develop a lottery game," Krejci said in an office at the company’s corporate headquarters that is as much a shrine to SPAM as anything.

Krejci pitched the idea to MDI Inc. of Las Vegas, Nev., a firm that develops lottery game ideas for several states.

MDI liked the idea and so did the Minnesota State Lottery. Next, an agreement was negotiated to use Hormel Foods’ most famous consumer-branded meat product on an instant scratch game card, according to Krejci.

"Why SPAM?" a doubting Thomas may ask. "Why not?" Krejci said. "SPAM equals fun."

Fun, indeed.

The fan club is only the tip of an ice … make that meatberg of fanaticism. The quarterly newsletter tells more.

Last fall’s edition was a tribute to "big SPAM eaters" and told how Doyle Wolfe and Gerald Stephas Wolfe, a grocery buyer for Lund’s grocery store in south Minneapolis, has eaten 7,951 SPAMWICH sandwiches since 1967. When Stephas retired with the Minnesota Department of Transportation, he shared a secret: he ate a SPAM sandwich every workday for 33 years.

The SPAMTASTIC Gift Catalog pays homage to the canned luncheon meat first produced in 1937 with more than 125 items all bearing the familiar navy blue and yellow colors.

Fan club, museum notoriety, gift catalog, newsletter, Web site and now a lottery game … where does it end?

Krejci called SPAM a "very unique product" and let’s be honest that it is. The ubiquitous canned luncheon meat, nor any other product, is not everybody’s favorite. It just seems that way, so pervasive is SPAM’s presence.

That presence will grow beginning May 30, when 3,200 retail outlets begin selling the Minnesota State Lottery game cards and 30-second television commercials and radio spots will deliver the message to homes everywhere this spring and summer.

Six million dollars is waiting to be given away.

According to Mellein, there will be 13 $25,000 prizes total.

More than 170,000 prizes will be $10 and higher. One SPAM symbol is worth $2. The more SPAM symbols players scratch the more money they win. A frying pan symbol is worth $5, a genuine SPAMBURGER symbol, $100, and a HORMEL symbol, $500.

All this and the 10th anniversary of SPAM Jam coming this summer to Austin. Coming on the heels of the launching of a sure-thing instant lottery game, the celebration’s milestone can’t help but be the most popular and best attended yet.

"The nice thing about Hormel Foods and SPAM is that they have kept the brand very sacred, but they’ve done it with tongue-in-cheek. There’s a healthy sense of humor about this product," Mellein said.

Krejci appears nonplussed about this latest ascension of SPAM-mania into human consciousness.

He is thinking about the next SPAM zenith, and it’s out of this world, literally.

"SPAM is one of the few, if not the only, you might want to check on that, but I think it is the only consumer-branded food product that has it’s own Web site," he said. "The SPAM can is in the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress. There’s the fan club and news letter, too, and now it has the only state lottery scratch game in our headquarters state."

"We sell SPAM all over the world and the only new market would be another planet," Krejci said.