I don’t make it out to Taiwan very often, but I find myself in Taipei again, and was strolling through a grocery store when I ran across a package of a so-called “Quaker Ginseng” drink mix, complete with the typical image of the Quaker man.
Is it just me, or does this name and image – of the Quaker man posing next to ginseng – seem amusing and out-of-place to anyone else? I can’t imagine that the real, historical Quakers drank or were familiar with ginseng. For all we know, they might even have regarded it as a product of the devil.
In fact, all of the “Quaker” products in Taiwan seem pretty weird to me. Do they even have plain old Quaker oats in Taiwan?
According to chat gpt, the brand was only “inspired” by quaker values of purity but has no actual affiliation with quakers. Further reading in encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia don’t reveal any connection to quakers (looks like it was started by some millers in Ohio)
Also, if you look closely at the photo, you can see that all packages of the Quaker ginseng drink mix are protected by some special tie-on security clip, maybe some exploding dye package, or an alarm-triggering mechanism. Only some products in the store had this extra protective tagging – presumably only those products that are popular and at high risk of theft. So I guess the locals like their Quaker ginseng.
If that is the case, then it’s somewhat interesting that the locals opted to continue using the Quaker man’s image on the box. Does that mean that, when buying a ginseng drink mix, the locals trust the face of the Quaker man more than they would trust a local Asian face?
