About
A website about making snacks far, far too big.
How it started
In early April 2006 I bought a couple of the new KitKat Chunky with Peanut Butter bars that were widely available in the UK. Out of a combination of boredom and curiosity, I took it upon myself to replace the peanut butter inside the bar with some of the store-bought conventional variety. The peanut butter was replaced, the bar reassembled, and taste-tested with favourable results.
Having documented these shenanigans in pictures, I posted it up on a website forum, where it received a lot of interest. At the suggestion of someone else I turned the concept into a website, and Pimp That Snack was born.
The idea was simple enough to explain in a sentence: take a snack everyone recognises, and rebuild it at a ridiculous scale. Photograph every step. The rest of the internet took it from there.
The name
It launched as Pimp My Snack. In May 2006 that stopped, after Viacom's legal representatives got in touch to explain that the name infringed trademarks relating to a television programme of theirs about modifying cars. The site became Pimp That Snack, which is what it has been ever since. The original domain still points here.
The bit where it got out of hand
On 2 August 2006, Channel 4's The F-Word ran a segment on the site, in which the food critic Giles Coren pimped a giant Jaffa cake. The programme went out to around six million people. Keeping the site online that evening was, to put it generously, a challenge.
Other coverage followed — Annie Mac's programme on BBC Radio 1, Ready Steady Cook on BBC Two in November 2006, Channel 4's Homemade in February 2007, and BBC Radio 5 Live in February 2010.
How it worked
Anyone could submit a pimp. You emailed in your photographs and your write-up, it went up on the site, and then everyone else voted on it from 1 to 100. That score is why Top Rated exists, and the votes are still attached to every project — 9,827 of them on The Creme de la Creme Egg alone.
There were no rules to speak of, which is how the archive ended up containing a burger that weighed 11kg, several things that required structural engineering, and at least one snack that had to be assembled on a garage floor.
Where it got to
- 477 pimps published between 2006 and 2015
- 449 different people sent one in
- 4,181 photographs, almost all of them taken on whatever camera happened to be in the kitchen
- 194,351 votes cast
Submissions closed a while ago — the heyday is long past, and it had been a good while since anything new came in. But the site stays up, permanently, as a reminder of what can be done with a little ingenuity and flair, and in the hope that it inspires future generations who somehow still find themselves here.
This version of the site
The archive has been rebuilt as a plain static site so it can survive without maintenance. Every URL from the old site still works, every photograph is still served from where it always was, and there is no longer a database, a login, or a content management system that can fall over. It should now outlast all of us.