Wait, NFL players eat how many Uncrustables?

Brock Purdy ate one at his locker before Super Bowl. Andy Reid once offered it to his players as a reward. Before practice, during training camp and in the halftime locker room, they're popular with players across the NFL, a taste of childhood wrapped up in plastic.

A few years ago The athlete wrote about orange slices, the NFL's secret halftime snack (fun fact: teams must provide the visiting team with “three dozen sliced ​​oranges at halftime”). But over the course of reporting on this story, many players said they had ditched the halftime citrus in favor of something else: Uncrustables, the sealed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that you find in the freezer section of your local supermarket — and apparently permeate the NFL.

At the end of the 2023 season The athlete was trying to figure out how many Uncrustables the League actually eats. And after convincing team members that it was actually a real question and not another scam message, most teams agreed to extrapolate their data from last year. A handful declined to participate and a few others said they were PB&J purists who made their own sandwiches.

But based on the information collected, it's safe to say that NFL teams complete between 3,600 and 4,300 uncrustables per week. When you factor in training camps and the teams that didn't share their data, NFL teams get through just fine at least 80,000 uncrustables per year.

Len Kretchman, a former wide receiver at North Dakota State, lived in the small town of Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and worked with schools in the food service industry. Sometime in the mid-'90s, Len said, his wife, Emily, suggested he create a mass-produced, crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

The project appealed to Len's business instincts: 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 a few drinks.

“We’re not replicating the atomic bomb here,” Len said. “We're trying to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich… There were two people standing there, goofing off, probably drinking 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, that’s our favorite shape,” Len said. “Do you have to go to a committee and ask people what the form should be? No. It's round. So we got to the point.”

Next he grabbed a cup from his kitchen cupboard.

“If you asked moms how they (removed the crust from a sandwich) 30 years ago, they would say, 'I found a jar in my cupboard that was the right size and I pressed on the bread and.' cut off the crust.' '” Kretchman said. “And that’s exactly what we did!”

They added a crimp to the edges of the crustless bread, which was easy, but then had to figure out how to keep the jelly from running out, which wasn't possible. Every time they thawed their creations, the jelly bled into the bread and ruined the sandwich. A lot of trial and error followed.

“Finally, we put the blob of jelly in the middle of the bread and then covered it with peanut butter, coating the jelly so it wouldn’t leak into the bread,” Kretchman said. “That was the key. That was our great moment.”

Kretchman and his business partner David Geske presented their product to local schools. They needed a name. Once again the idea landed in her kitchen. They asked a business partner's 11-year-old son for a suggestion. His answer: The Incredible Uncrustable. Four years later, in 1999, Smuckers bought the company, dropped the first part of the name and introduced the country to the Uncrustable.

It took a while, but the NFL wasn't far behind.

The uncrustables eaten by the NFL in one year would cover over 18 yards of a football field

They weren't there when former Pro Bowl tight end Dallas Clark was drafted by the Indianapolis Colts in 2003. He is sure of that. But the moment this new treat joined the food aisle with “all the other healthy crap” the Colts provided? He can't really say.

All he remembers is the feeling that something beautiful happened.

“It's up there on the cell phone where you ask, 'How is this done?'” Clark said. “When they came out, I thought, 'Hmm, why didn't someone think of this a long time ago?'”

It was Jon Torine's job to stockpile these snacks, “healthy crap” and all, for the Colts. And it was a particularly important task during Super Bowl week in 2007, when the Colts played the Chicago Bears in Miami. In the ballroom of the hotel where the team was staying, Torine, the Colts' strength and conditioning coach at the time, provided a pad that the players could pick up and take with them as they moved from meeting to meeting.

“We all shot and scored,” said Jeff Saturday, a center on that team. “We grabbed five or six at once.”

Clark, a player who had trouble supporting his weight, threw them into his backpack without caring what would happen to them there. “The Uncrustables always found their way down and got crushed by the playbook,” he said. “But still edible. Still in a compartment.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Saturday said. “You could throw your playbook over it, it didn’t make a difference. Bruised, unbruised, you will crush it.”

They are now an integral part of many NFL teams. San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle eats two on flights to away games and between two and four on flights home. Chiefs defensive end Mike Danna eats them at the team facility and at home. Ravens kicker Justin Tucker grabs one from the snack table on the way to meetings. Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce claimed on his podcast that he eats more of it than “anything else in the world.”

“We’re all creatures of habit, dude,” Saturday said. “Almost scary. If you’re the type of person who has two Uncrustables a day, that’s exactly what you do.”

Every week, the NFL consumes nearly the weight of three Travis Kelces in Uncrustables

Torine and most nutritionists wouldn't recommend frozen, processed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as the No. 1 healthy snack option for players. But Uncrustables can do the job, especially when time is limited and even nutritionists at the highest levels of athletic performance make compromises.

Bread and jelly provide players with quick carbohydrates. The peanut butter provides a little fat and a little protein. They're easy to digest, convenient to eat, and a comfort food that players love (although there's a lot of disagreement about whether grape or strawberry is a better jelly flavor – the correct answer is strawberry).

In fact, the Colts also ate Uncrustables at halftime of Super Bowl XLI when they beat the Bears 29-17.

“Maybe that was the difference,” Torine said, laughing.