Last year, Lipton sold 58 million individual packets of its onion-flavored soup and dip mix. Even when you factor its usage in the occasional meat or side dish, that’s a lot of dip. Makes you wonder if this onion dip—whose quality may be more reliant on nostalgia than, say, its own merit—were invented today, would it still be as popular? Or is it the beneficiary of a set of Gladwellian circumstances that are arguably impossible to replicate today?
It’s hard to imagine a series of events as fortuitous as those afforded to Lipton and its onion dip.