The Cookie That Started as a Copy and Became the World's Best-Seller — The Extraordinary Story of Oreo

In the early twentieth century, on Ninth Avenue in the Chelsea neighbourhood of Manhattan, stood one of the most significant factory buildings in American food history. It was here, inside the sprawling brick complex of the National Biscuit Company — a corporation built from the merger of 114 bakeries in 1898 — that a cookie was born in 1912 that would go on to become the best-selling cookie in the world.

But the Oreo's origin is not the triumphant story of invention. It is the far more interesting story of imitation — and of how a company took someone else's idea, executed it better, marketed it relentlessly, and never looked back.

Four years before Oreo existed, a company called Sunshine Biscuits had introduced a cookie called Hydrox — two dark chocolate wafers with a sweet cream filling in the middle. It was popular. It was distinctive. It was, by any measure, the original chocolate cream sandwich cookie.

The National Biscuit Company — Nabisco — saw the opportunity and responded with its own version. On 6 March 1912, the first Oreo Biscuit was sold to a grocer named S.C. Thuesen in Hoboken, New Jersey. Nine and a quarter pounds of Oreo Biscuits cost him $1.85. The tin they came in cost an additional 50 cents. The original design featured a wreath-like pattern around the edge of the cookie and the name OREO embossed in the centre. The name was trademarked on 14 March 1912.

The origin of the name itself remains genuinely uncertain. Multiple theories exist, and Nabisco has never definitively confirmed which one is correct. What is certain is that the name was short, distinctive, and — as history would prove — unforgettable.

The Cookie That Kept Reinventing Itself

In those early years, the Oreo was a good product fighting to distinguish itself from the original. The decisive advantage came from a man named Samuel J. Porcello — a food scientist who worked for Nabisco for many years — who developed the white cream filling that would become Oreo's most iconic element. The creme recipe began with lard, which was later replaced with hydrogenated vegetable oil — a change that made the cookie unexpectedly beloved by plant-based eaters decades before plant-based eating was a trend.

The cookie's name changed before its formula did. In 1921, the "Oreo Biscuit" was renamed "Oreo Sandwich." In 1948, it became "Oreo Chocolate Sandwich Cookie." The name kept evolving to reflect what the product had become — not an imitation of Hydrox, but a category of its own.

By the 1970s, Oreo had not only surpassed Hydrox in sales — it had made Hydrox an afterthought. The cookie that had inspired it would eventually be discontinued, revived, and discontinued again. Oreo, meanwhile, kept growing.

In 2002, Ninth Avenue between 15th and 16th Streets in Manhattan — the block where the original Nabisco Chelsea factory stood and where Oreo had been born — was ceremonially renamed Oreo Way. The street is a permanent marker of where a cookie had become a cultural institution.

Today, Oreo cookies are available in more than 100 countries. They have been produced in thousands of flavour and format variations. They have been the subject of legal battles over the eating ritual, academic studies on consumer behaviour, and some of the most celebrated marketing campaigns in modern advertising history.

The Ritual That Created a Community

The single most important marketing decision in Oreo's history was not a campaign, a celebrity endorsement, or a product launch. It was the articulation of a ritual.

Twist. Lick. Dunk.

The "Twist, Lick, Dunk" instruction — describing the optimal method of eating an Oreo by twisting apart the two wafers, licking the creme filling, and dunking the chocolate wafers in milk — was introduced in 1987. It has now been Oreo's core marketing message for nearly four decades, across dozens of countries and hundreds of campaigns.

This is not a tagline. It is a behaviour that the brand teaches, repeats, and makes into a shared cultural experience. A child eating their first Oreo learns the ritual. A parent watching their child eat an Oreo remembers performing the ritual themselves. The experience of eating an Oreo becomes inseparable from the memory of how it felt to do so — and that memory is Oreo's most powerful and most durable marketing asset.

When Oreo launched in India in 2011 under Mondelez International — which had become the parent company following the 2012 acquisition of Nabisco — the Twist, Lick, Dunk ritual was the centrepiece of the entry strategy. Rather than repositioning the cookie for Indian tastes or creating an entirely new marketing platform, Mondelez introduced Oreo as a shared eating experience — something that connected family members across generations and placed the cookie at the centre of parent-child interaction.

As Sudhanshu Nagpal, a senior executive at Mondelez India, has said: "Since the start of our journey in India in 2011, we have banked on the Twist, Lick, Dunk ritual and experience which has gone on to become the biggest differentiator for the brand in the category."

The 100 Daily Twists That Built a Team Capable of History

In 2012, Oreo turned 100 years old. To celebrate the centenary, the brand launched one of the most ambitious social media campaigns of its era: 100 consecutive days of content, each post connecting the Oreo cookie to something culturally significant happening in the news on that day.

The campaign was called the Daily Twist. It ran from 25 June to 2 October 2012. Posts commemorated the Mars Rover landing, Pride Month, the London Olympics, and dozens of other moments in American and global culture. A team from Oreo's brand group and its creative agency 360i assembled daily in a war room in New York — producing, approving, and publishing content that was topical, clever, and relentlessly on-brand.

The Daily Twist was not just a content campaign. It was training. It built the institutional muscle — the agility, the approval processes, the creative speed — that would make possible the most famous real-time marketing moment in advertising history.

The Tweet That Changed Advertising Forever

On the evening of 3 February 2013, Super Bowl XLVII was being played at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers. Oreo was among the game's sponsors. Its team — approximately 15 people from the brand and its agency partners — was gathered in a war room, connected by laptops and phones, prepared to react to whatever the evening produced.

They had rehearsed the day before. They had worksheets for every scenario. They had decision-makers, creative teams, legal representatives, and senior brand management all in the same loop, ready to act without delay.

Then, during the third quarter, a power outage plunged the Superdome into near-darkness. The game stopped. 34 minutes passed before the lights came back on. Millions of people watching from home and in the stadium were confused, then curious, then simply bored.

Michael Nuzzo, creative director at 360i, spoke the line into the war room almost immediately: "You can dunk in a blackout."

In under a minute, the team had composed and published the tweet. A simple image: an Oreo cookie, dramatically lit in the dark, with the caption: "Power out? No problem." And below it: "You can still dunk in the dark."

What followed was unprecedented. The tweet garnered over 15,000 retweets on Twitter and approximately 20,000 likes on Facebook within hours. Oreo's Instagram following grew from 2,000 to 36,000 following the post. The campaign generated $525 million in earned media impressions. The Huffington Post wrote that it was "one of the most buzz-worthy ads of the Super Bowl — and it wasn't even a commercial." The campaign went on to win a Cannes Lions award.

But the most important thing Lisa Mann, then Vice President of Cookies at Kraft Foods, said about the tweet was this: "It took two years to do that tweet."

It was not spontaneous genius. It was the result of the Daily Twist's 100 days of practice, an over-prepared war room, and two years of building a team that could move with the speed and precision that the moment required. The Dunk in the Dark tweet became the most studied example of real-time marketing in the history of digital advertising — cited in business schools, marketing courses, and agency playbooks worldwide.

The Marketing Strategy Built on Play, Memory, and Speed

Oreo's marketing has always operated on a set of distinct and deeply considered principles — none of which require the largest budget in the room.

The ritual as the product differentiator. Twist, Lick, Dunk is not an instruction. It is an identity. It separates people who know how to eat an Oreo from those who don't, creates a sense of belonging in the act of eating, and makes the cookie itself secondary to the experience of consuming it. This ritual has been the foundation of Oreo's marketing globally since 1987 — consistent enough to be iconic, flexible enough to be localised.

Cultural agility over planned advertising. The Dunk in the Dark tweet was not the only example of Oreo's commitment to real-time relevance. During the 2012 Daily Twist campaign, Oreo connected its cookie to the Mars Rover landing, Pride Month, and the London Olympics — each time through content that was topical, brief, and instantly shareable. The Daily Twist established the principle that Oreo would live in culture, not just on shelves.

Flavour as a news cycle. Oreo has released hundreds of limited-edition flavour variants over the decades — from Birthday Cake Oreos to Pumpkin Spice, Wasabi Oreos in China, Blueberry Ice Cream in Asia, and Carrot Cake in various markets. Each new flavour is simultaneously a product launch and a media event. Fans debate new releases. Limited editions create urgency. The flavour calendar keeps Oreo in the conversation continuously, even when there is no campaign running.

The ritual adapted for every culture. When entering new markets — India in 2011, China, Indonesia, across the Middle East — Oreo does not impose a single global personality. It exports the ritual but localises the storytelling. In India, the parent-child Twist, Lick, Dunk television spots were adapted to reflect Indian family dynamics and the emotional register of Indian advertising. The cookie is the same. The cultural translation is precise.

Oreo Way as a living landmark. The 2002 renaming of the block where Oreo was born is the kind of brand milestone that no amount of advertising spend can purchase. It is a physical, permanent, publicly acknowledged mark of cultural significance — one that reinforces, in concrete and asphalt, that Oreo is not merely a product but a piece of the city and the country that built it.

From a Chelsea Factory to 100 Countries

Today, Oreo is owned by Mondelez International — the global snacking company formed when Kraft Foods split into two entities in 2012. It is manufactured in multiple countries and sold in more than 100. It is the world's best-selling cookie brand.

The street where it was born is named after it. The tweet it sent during a blackout is studied in business schools. The ritual it taught the world in 1987 is still being performed by children who have never heard of the cookie it was supposed to imitate.

Oreo did not invent the chocolate sandwich cookie. It invented the idea that eating a cookie could be a ritual, a memory, a shared language that crosses generations and cultures — and that a brand willing to show up with speed, creativity, and genuine playfulness would always have something to say, even in the dark.

Especially in the dark.