Oreo has been around since 1912 and plans to be around for a whole lot longer. The company now has a vault that can withstand an asteroid blast in an arctic mountain on the Svalbard archipelago in Norway to ensure its legendary treat lives on – no matter what. In the vault, there’s the recipe along with some packs of everyone’s favorite sandwich cookie and powdered milk packs.
It’s not the only one to build a bunker there either. The Svalbard archipelago is a safe, remote location with ideal climate conditions for preservation. A few other groups – organizations, companies, and governments – have their own depositories to ensure the safekeeping of valuable items if a global catastrophe, like an asteroid or world war, strikes the planet.
One of the largest is the Arctic World Archive (AWA). It contains digital artifacts from more than 15 contributing nations to preserve the world’s information for future generations. The GitHub Arctic Code Vault is also in the AWA. It contains a collection of open-source software to safeguard our modern world’s heritage for centuries to come.
However, what inspired Oreo was not the AWA, but the Global Seed Vault (GSV) – a separate depository set up in 2008. It contains nearly one million different varieties of seeds. It aims to preserve diversity amidst the ecological loss if climate change continues.
Bente Naeverdal, GSV’s property manager, told Time of Svalbard’s optimum suitability for a preservation project:
It is away from the places on Earth where you have war and terror, everything maybe you are afraid of in other places. It is situated in a safe place.
Another inspiration for Oreo was Asteroid 2018VP1, which had a slim to none (0.41%) chance of hitting Earth’s atmosphere earlier this month. Cookie fan Olivia Gordon asked Oreo (via Twitter) what it would do if the asteroid hit. And while the asteroid has long passed our planet, Oreo took the threat as a call to action. It’s ready now should anything else arrive to threaten the existence of their cookies!
And it didn’t end with the vault. Oreo took precautions a step further and wrapped its contents in mylar. It wrote in a statement:
As an added precaution, the Oreo packs are wrapped in mylar, which can withstand temperatures from -80 degrees to 300 degrees Fahrenheit and is impervious to chemical reactions, moisture, and air, keeping the cookies fresh and protected for years to come.
It also said that the powdered milk only needs snow added before it’s ready to have Oreos dunked in. They’ve got it all figured out!
