San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy ate one in the locker room before the Super Bowl. Andy Reid, the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, once offered it to his players as a reward. Before activities, during preseason practices, and in the locker room during halftime, they are a favorite of players across the NFL, a childhood touch wrapped in plastic.
A few years ago, The Athletic website showed that orange slices were a kind of secret NFL halftime snack. Fun fact: teams are required to provide three dozen sliced oranges to the visiting team at each match.
But in the course of researching this article, many NFL players said they passed on halftime citrus in favor of something else: Uncrustables, a sealed peanut butter and jelly sandwich found in the frozen food section of American supermarkets.
At the end of the 2023 season, The Athletic tried to find out how many Uncrustables NFL teams consume. And after team officials were convinced that this was an honest question, most teams agreed to share their data from last year. Some refused to participate, and a few others said they were purists and made their own sandwiches.
But based on the information gathered, it’s safe to say that NFL teams consume 3,600 to 4,300 Uncrustables per week. When taking into account preseason workouts and teams that haven’t shared their data, NFL teams easily consume at least 80,000 Uncrustables per year.
Len Kretchman, a former receiver at North Dakota State, lived in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and worked with schools in the food service industry. Sometime in the mid-90s, he said his wife, Emily, suggested he create a mass-produced peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the crust.
The project appealed to Kretchman’s entrepreneurial instinct: a simple idea with a complex logistical problem to solve. The Kretchmans started in their kitchen with a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, a jar of jelly and some drinks.
“We’re not recreating the atomic bomb here,” said Len Kretchman. “We’re trying to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. There were two people standing there, joking around, probably having a beer and a glass of wine and saying, ‘What do you think of this?'”
The first decision they made was that the sandwich should be round.
“The moon is round, the sun is round, the Earth is round, it’s our favorite shape,” said Len Kretchman. “Do you need to go to a committee and survey people about what the shape should be? No. It’s round. So we worked that out.”
Then he took a glass from the kitchen cabinet.
If you asked mothers how they got the crust off a sandwich 30 years ago, he said, the answer would be, “I found a cup in my cupboard that was the right dimension, pressed it into the bread and cut off the crust.” And that’s what we did!”
They added a pressed edge to the ends of the crustless bread, like cooks do with pierogi and other pastries, which was easy. It wasn’t easy then to figure out how to stop the jelly from leaking. Every time they defrosted their creations, the jelly would run onto the bread and ruin the sandwich. Much trial and error followed.
“We finally put the jelly portion in the middle of the bread and then covered it with peanut butter and wrapped the jelly so it wouldn’t leak into the bread,” said Len Kretchman. “That was key. That was our ‘Eureka’ moment.”
He and his business partner, David Geske, introduced their product to schools. They needed a name. Once again, the idea came to him in his kitchen. They asked a business associate’s 11-year-old son for a suggestion. His answer: “The Incredible Uncrustable.” Four years later, in 1999, Smuckers purchased the company, removed the first part of the name and introduced the country to Uncrustable.
It took a while, but the NFL wasn’t far behind.
The Uncrustables weren’t there when former Pro Bowl tight end Dallas Clark was drafted by the Indianapolis Colts in 2003. That’s for sure. But the moment this new treat joined the food provided by the Colts? He really can’t say.
All he remembers is the feeling that something beautiful had happened.
“It’s up there with the cell phone, where you’re like, ‘How is this done?'” Clark said. “When they showed up, it was like, ‘man, why didn’t someone think of this before?’.”
It was Jon Torine’s job to stock these snacks for the Colts. And it was an especially important job during Super Bowl week in 2007, when the Colts played the Chicago Bears in Miami. In the ballroom of the hotel where the team stayed, Torine, the Colts’ strength and conditioning coach at the time, set up a table for the players to grab and go as they moved from meeting to meeting.
“We were all catching and scoring,” said Jeff Saturday, an athlete on that team. “We were taking five, six at a time.”
Clark, who was struggling to maintain his playing weight, threw them into his backpack, not worrying about what would happen to them once there. “The Uncrustables always found their way to the bottom and got crushed by the playbook,” he said. “But still edible. Still wrapped.”
Saturday said, “It didn’t matter. You could throw your playbook at them, it didn’t make any difference. Crushed, not crushed, you’ll devour them.”
Now they are a staple for many NFL teams. San Francisco tight end George Kittle eats two on flights to away games and two to four on return flights. Kansas City defensive end Mike Danna eats them at the team facility and at home. Baltimore Ravens kicker Justin Tucker grabs one from the snack table on his way to meetings. Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce stated on his podcast that he eats more of them than “anything else in the world.”
“We’re all creatures of habit, man,” Saturday said. “Almost frighteningly so. If you’re the type to eat two Uncrustables a day, that’s what you do.”
Torine and most nutritionists would not recommend frozen, processed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as their No. 1 healthy snack option for players. But Uncrustables can get the job done, especially when time is limited, and even nutritionists at the highest level of sports performance make allowances.
The bread and jam provide quick carbohydrates for players. Peanut butter offers a little fat and a little protein. They are easy to digest, convenient to eat, and a comfort food that gamers love. (There is wide disagreement about whether grape or strawberry jelly is the best flavor. The correct answer is strawberry.)
In fact, the 2006 Colts also ate Uncrustables during halftime of the Super Bowl when they beat the Bears 29-17.
“So maybe that was the difference,” Torine said, laughing.
