Extreme Makeover, Weiner Edition: RKS Redesigns the Deadly Hot Dog

Last week, the American Academy of Pediatrics called for the redesign of hot dogs. “If you were to take the best engineers in the world and asked them to design a perfect plug for a child’s airway, you couldn’t do better than a hot dog,” said Dr. Gary Smith, former chairman of the AAP’s Committee on Injury, Violence, and Poison Prevention. “When it’s wedged in tightly, that child is going to die.” Never ones to resist a challenge, or the chance to play with our food, we carved out a little time to explore the redesign of the hot dog.

We began by thinking outside the bun. What other ways could we come up with for hot dog delivery? Looking for inspirations from food innovations like GoGurt and Push Pops, we briefly toyed with the idea of a semi-solid hot-dog paste…a Push-Pup, if you will, not unlike the Sushi Popper. But frankly, the idea of a hot dog in a non-Newtonian form, was more than a little gag-inducing.

Read the rest of Ravi’s blog post on Fast Company