Bafel or Vafel? the Israeli wafer controversy

May 3, 2011 - 8:16 PM by

Ever since time began, or at least since I’ve lived in Israel, one of the national junk foods has been the crunchy, sweet, chocolaty wafer snack called ‘Vafels.’ They’re as Israeli as sabras, Bamba and botz.
While most people call them vafel, evidently they’re also known in some circles as ‘bafels.’ However you call them, in recent years, with the proliferation of dozens of other junk foot items, the sale of the wafers began to sag.

Saatchi & Saatchi Tel Aviv solved the problem by launching a viral ad campaign to solve the age old problem of whether to call the wafer Vafel or Bafel.

I don’t know where I was, but I missed all the hoopla, which according to this Youtube recap spread to TV shows, radio talk shows and newspaper columns. In response to a survey which overwhelmingly favored Bafel, Elite changed all their packaging accordingly.

See the strange story in its entirety here.

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Tags: • Category: A New Reality, Blogging, Food, General, Israeliness, Life, Pop Culture 

Comments

3 Comments on Bafel or Vafel? the Israeli wafer controversy

  1. Rachel on Tue, May 3rd 2011 10:09 PM

    2. The worst part is, those Israelis who go with “bafel” actually prefer to pronounce it “bafla”! Since the original basis for this godawful bastardization is the word “waffle”, I will persist in my belief that “vafel” is the correct pronunciation and that Elite were engaging, at best, in a bit of clever advertising that grabbed some attention. However, if you take the more sinister view, they — aided by their minions at Saatchi & Saatchi — were engaged in rewriting history by negating the period of the British Mandate (which brought waffles and wafers to the Land of Israel) and promoting that evil gateway to illiteracy known from this time on as “Heebonics”!

  2. shira on Wed, May 4th 2011 12:33 AM

    3. I allways went with Bafla, cause of HaGashash HaHiver, but now that it’s on the box itself it seems cheap. they should go with the Hebrew ‘Afifit’ (that’s according to Avshalom Korr) and leave the rest to the public.

  3. baffled on Wed, May 4th 2011 11:30 PM

    4. I’m baffled.

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