Are Hawkins Cheezies the Snack Food of Canadian Sovereignty?

Fuck Cheetos. Go ahead, extend your orange-dusted middle finger at me. I have no interest in snacks that require anthropomorphic characters like Chester Cheetah to convince me to buy the product they shill. When all of us are wondering and worrying about buying Canuck-produced goods, I will happily forgo your American snack food, soda pop, sports drink, and bottled water conglomerate. I find the Cheetofication of foodstuffs—covering foods in Cheetos dust, like copper-dusted taco shells and flamin’ hot whatchamacallits or even, God help us, Cheetos-flavoured lip balm—to be some of the laziest forms of product development. If your product needs development, then maybe it isn’t as good as you think it is. I don’t need my food choices to be attention seekers. I am quite happy with my bag of Hawkins Cheezies. That’s Cheezies with a “zed,” not an “es,” and most certainly not a “zee.” I’ve been writing about food for nearly twenty years now, and I am just as happy to write about donair culture in Halifax as I am to write about the lives of farmers. At home, I eat based on what’s in season, bake with whole-grain flours, and can talk about apple varietals for hours. But I am also just as likely as you to be tired on a Thursday evening, so out come the boxed mac and cheese and frozen peas, and don’t even think about sneaking one of my fries without asking. And nearly every time I go shopping, at least one bag of Hawkins makes its way into my cart. The metric by which I measure the value of Hawkins is multi-latitudinal. It is of the past and de rigueur, retro yet now in both flavour and design: quietly assured yet bold. And unlike Cheetos, it has not become synonymous with the skin tone of a certain world leader. Canadians have had the luxury of Hawkins being a part of our lives for over seventy-five years. It would be easy to wax nostalgic about Hawkins Cheezies, but nostalgia is a cheap and ineffective flavour booster. The recent demise of the Cherry Blossom—the obnoxiously oozy cherry-filled chocolate candy your baby boomer relatives liked—proves that sweet childhood memories do not mean actual deliciousness. Hawkins, however, still pleases.

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It’s important to consider Hawkins Cheezies as a historic and cultural entity. Yes, we Canadians view it as being one of us, but like Kraft Dinner, the truth is a bit more complicated. The TL;DR version is that around 1940, Ohio farmer Jim Marker figured out a way to extrude corn into sticks to feed to his cattle. Chicago confectioner W. T. Hawkins heard about this process and thought of the snacking possibilities: frying them, seasoning them with cheddar powder. (Cheetos inventor and Fritos owner Charles Elmer Doolin would not come out with his own extruded corn snack until 1948.) In 1949, Hawkins sent Marker to Tweed, Ontario, to run a Canadian branch of his company. The Tweed factory burned down in 1956, but Cheezies production would begin again in the nearby town of Belleville, where the company has been based ever since. Today, the company is still family owned and operated, and employees at the plant don’t work on Friday afternoons or weekends. Each bag that comes out of that plant in Belleville contains multitudes of shapes and sizes: pea-sized nubbins, twigs as thick as your thumb, and every size in between. What that means is that the Hawkins Cheezies is a delivery system of variable textural and flavour intensities. The corn snacks are still made using the same design that Marker created. This high degree of variability means that once they are fried and seasoned, the final product can vary subtly or grossly in terms of crunch and cheese saturation. There is no standard size; its platonic ideal is as individual as its eaters. Cheetos tend to stay on the skinnier side of things, with a large one viewed as a rarity. When we buy Hawkins, we know that multiple large Cheezies are nearly guaranteed in each bag. We rely on that. When it comes to Canadian snack foods, we don’t hope for blind luck or corporate benevolence; we expect textural variability as a given. On the production side, very little has changed with Hawkins Cheezies since its inception. The retail size of the 210-gram bag is a general staple, as is the 420-gram Big Boy (which contains three separate bags), while many of us seek out the various snack packs at Halloween. The packaging has been consistent for at least fifty years, with its easily spotted yet low-key red and white vertical stripes, a blue and white logo, and an orange cellophane window giving us a peek within. With the exception of the change from hydrogenated vegetable oil to a trade-secret trans fat–free frying medium, the flavour has never strayed. I don’t want or need a ranch Hawkins. Or any other kind. This low-key modus operandi extends all the way to the grocery store. Unlike larger brands that pay-to-play in large-scale grocery store chains to obtain maximum eye-level shelf placement, Hawkins is often found on the bottom or top shelves. But Hawkins doesn’t need to pay-to-play. In true Canadian fashion, they don’t attempt to curry favour or attention toward themselves. They are the embodiment of “no need to play an ace” when you know you’ve already won the game. In a time when social media is viewed as a de facto promotional tool, Hawkins plays things cool. The website was static for nearly twenty years, and they created an Instagram account only in June 2024. As of this writing, they have posted just over forty-five times on their account. And they don’t advertise much themselves: their fans do it for them. Quick searches on Instagram yield all forms of Hawkins-related art and artifacts, many of them for sale: metal lapel pins, embroidered renderings of the product, tufted rugs, and homemade handbags using the same colours and stripes. Even I own Hawkins-related art: a beautifully rendered painting by Kim Floyd, a Halifax-based artist who did a series of paintings featuring Canadian foodstuffs. The legacy of Cheezies extends to all forms of media. Comedian Brent Butt gave the signature bags high visibility on his TV show, Corner Gas. CBC Radio’s The Debaters recently devoted an entire segment of the show to it, titled “Hawkins Cheezies are the king of the chip aisle.” During the segment, pro-Hawkins debater Deborah Kimmet described how a tech guy had cleaned her computer and stated that they found “orange fuzz” in her computer, like she had been eating Cheetos. Kimmet responded emphatically and proudly, “No, sir, I was eating Hawkins Cheezies.” The repair person then bowed to her and said, “I forgive you.” A recent This Hour Has 22 Minutes skit extolling the virtues of buying Canadian had Mark Critch enthusiastically rip a bag of Cheetos Puffs from Chris Wilson’s grocery cart, vigorously yelling, “HAWKINS! War is no time for soft Cheezies!” Over in the food media instaphere, lovable food science nerd J. Kenji López-Alt was recently gifted a Hawkins bag by his production manager, where he proclaimed that “if a Cheeto is like Wonder Bread, then these are like a baguette.” Amen to that. When I reach down to grab my bag of Hawkins from that bottom shelf, I occasionally catch the eye of other shoppers. There is a knowing glance, a nod, a tip of the hat. We know what’s up. We know what’s good. And we do silently judge you for choosing another corn-based cheese snack.The post Are Hawkins Cheezies the Snack Food of Canadian Sovereignty? first appeared on The Walrus.