Yes, I'll Add the Bacon...Again.
One afternoon in the year 2008 I stood up in the open-concept office at my day job and shouted to the 40 or so other folks within earshot, "Enough with all the bacon emails! There should just be a CNN of bacon."
"I'd subscribe to that!" yelled one co-worker.
"Me too!" exclaimed another.
That was all I needed to hear. Later that evening, BaconToday.com was born...and the site took off like a splatter of hot grease shooting straight out'a frying pan.
It might surprise some youngsters in the crowd that in 2008, every single human being on planet Earth had yet to succumb to the algorithmic allure of the Facebooks and Twitters and TikToks of the world, and a lot of those humans actually enjoyed plopping their own musings into the comment section on some random weirdo's bacon website. Lucky me.
Within 6 months, my goofy little site ranked #2 on most search engines for the word "bacon" (damn you Wikipedia with you Sir Fancises and Kevins and the like that kept us from that elusive #1 spot). Shortly thereafter my partner in bacon, Mike, joined the team.
Before long we were featured in newspapers across North America, interviewed live on syndicated radio shows, and one of us even posed for some fancy photos in a glossy magazine. We were flown to judge bacon competitions and our post office box overflowed with every bacon-related contraption known to mankind (pro tip: a supposedly bacon-scented air freshener does not a pleasant road trip make).
But by 2010, both Mike and I were burnt out on bacon. It wasn't only that we were tired of writing irreverently about all things greasy meat, or exhausted from selling our own advertising slots to keep the site cooking, or unwittingly branded "the bacon guys" by nearly everyone we knew...but we both felt a change was needed, and soon.
So, one sunny day in Southern California, while loading a case of black-peppered bacon from one of our sponsors into the back of my hand-me-down 1984 Nissan Maxima (thanks, mom) and listening to said sponsor boast about how he'd just purchased a defunct competitor's website I casually mused, "you should buy our site, too."
He quipped back, "shoot me a number!"
Without thinking, I did. To which he replied, "that'll work."
And just like that, the deal was done.
Now, fast forward a dozen years, stir in a dash of regret, add in eating a purely plant-based diet for about 6 of those years (yes, I'll admit that I traveled that soy-filled road), and we'll open the curtain on today's reality. I had to admit to myself that I missed bacon.
So on a whim one day in 2021 I shot an email to the owner of the website. To my surprised I received a reply from the new owner who fortunately wasn't all that interested in writing silly bacon stories -- he had purchased the previous owner's main product distribution business and the website was just an accessory in the deal.
I asked him, "would you be interested in selling the website?" He replied, "shoot me a number."
And shortly thereafter, my baby was on her way back home.