Planters Announces Pea-ovaries to Celebrate Women in Sports

By Meg Reid

Inspired by the positive reception PepsiCo recently received when they announced their new product “Cracker Jills,” Planters Peanuts has revealed their own new snack food designed to celebrate women in sports. 

“No longer will the name of a classic ballpark food only refer to the gonads of men,” announced Miguel Patricio, CEO of Kraft Heinz (Planters' parent company), on Wednesday. “From this day forward, women’s gonads will also be prominently featured in the name of America’s most well-known baseball snack!”

The new pea-ovaries product will be the same as traditional ballpark peanuts but will come in a sparkly hot pink bag and cost 7% more.

“We thought it was important to do something to recognize women athletes, who of course differ from regular athletes in that they are women,” Patricio explained.

Planters' announcement about pea-ovaries is the kind of large-scale commitment multinational corporations are increasingly making to signal their support for gender equity.  

And it seems to be working. 

Just weeks after Mars made the green M&M less sexy in January 2022, the gendered wage gap - which had remained stagnant at an average of 22% since 1994 and was larger for women of color than white women - narrowed by more than half. 

And 1 in 5 women no longer experience attempted or completed sexual assault during their lifetime after Hasbro removed the "Mister" from their Potato Head brand in February 2021.

But other inequities have remained. 

For decades, women have struggled to be taken seriously in sports, both as athletes and as fans, and experts have speculated that this is because there just aren't enough snacks with cartoons of women athletes or pink embellishments on the packaging.

That's where corporations like PepsiCo and Planters stepped up. 

Given their recent advancements in sports snack gender equity, soon girls interested in sports may grow up with their very own version of a classic baseball anthem. 

“‘Buy me some pea-ovaries and Cracker Jills’ just has a nice ring to it,” said Kathy Wilson, a mother of two teenage girls who play softball.

With Opening Day drawing near, girl athletes like Wilson’s daughters can draw inspiration from knowing that women finally have a snack of their own.