Kraft Dinner is considered a Canadian national dish. Canadians purchase 1.7 million of the 7 million boxes sold globally each week. They eat an average of 3.2 boxes of Kraft Dinner each year, 55% more than Americans. The meal is the most popular grocery item in the country, where “Kraft Dinner” has iconic status and has become a generic trademark of sorts for macaroni and cheese. For most teenagers it is the first thing they learn to cook on their own, and becomes an easy and inexpensive food for young people living away from home for the first time. It is often simply referred to by its initials K.D. As it carries a different name in Canada than the United States and other markets, the Canadian marketing and advertising platform is a made-in-Canada effort as US advertising cannot be easily adapted.
Pundit Rex Murphy has written that “Kraft Dinner revolves in that all-but-unobtainable orbit of the Tim Hortons doughnut and the A&W Teen Burger. It is one of that great trinity of quick digestibles that have been enrolled as genuine Canadian cultural icons.” Douglas Coupland has written that “cheese plays a weirdly large dietary role in the lives of Canadians, who have a more intimate and intense relationship with Kraft food products than the citizens of any other country. This is not a shameless product plug — for some reason, Canadians and Kraft products have bonded the way Australians have bonded with Marmite, or the English with Heinz baked beans. In particular, Kraft macaroni and cheese, known simply as Kraft Dinner, is the biggie, probably because it so precisely laser-targets the favoured Canadian food groups: fat, sugar, starch and salt”. Immigrants often mention Kraft Dinner when surveys ask for examples of Canadian food. As a measure of the product’s Canadian popularity, its Facebook page, KD Battle Zone, attracted 270,000 fans, despite there being no prizes for the contest.
Former Prime Minister Paul Martin regularly referred to it as his favourite food, though also confessed that he was unable to prepare it. During the same election current Prime Minister Stephen Harper stated that “I’ll never be able to give my kids a billion-dollar company, but Laureen and I are saving for their education. And I have actually cooked them Kraft Dinner — I like to add wieners.”
In the September 2012 issue of The Walrus magazine, the cover story “Manufacturing Taste” by Sasha Chapman details the history of the Canadian cheese industry and Kraft’s impact on it. She notably draws attention to Canada being unique in favouring a manufactured food product (made by a foreign company) as its national dish at the expense of local cheeses.
