Kremelta's Very Horny Recipes
Some issues with Kiwi brand Kremelta's website code has led to an amusing pornographic side dish.
Hi,
It’s been a busy Webworm week with rescued hummingbirds, Sean Plunket due in court, and a growing comments section that continues to restore my faith in humanity.
With all that in mind I wanted to send you into your weekend with a fun revelation from Jackson Wood, who discovered a pornographic side dish to iconic Kiwi food brand Kremelta.
In this newsletter Jackson explains how sharing a simple recipe for Cherry Ripe Chocolate Crackles can land you in steamy X-rated chaos.
It’s a recipe for a fun weekend of surprising your friends, siblings, and parents before the brand fixes a very unusual aspect to its business.
I’ll throw this sordid tale over to Jackson.
David.
Kremelta's Very Horny Recipes
by Jackson Wood
Sometimes the internet serves you up something deliciously befuddling, and this week I discovered one of the best edible internet oddities I’ve ever seen.
Let me set the table.
You’re searching for a recipe online to send to your sister. You find the page. Copy the link. Switch over to iMessage. Paste. You hit send before the preview loads but when the little spinny thing stops and it says ‘Delivered’ the preview pops up and you see “Asia porno norske porno videoer | escorte vestfold sexdate bergen”:
Before you hit unsend, you click on the link and… what the? It is the recipe for Caramilk Crackle Banoffee Pie you intended to send and not a dodgy link to a pornographic website. Phew.
But all this begs the question, why does New Zealand household brand name Kremelta (a vegetable shortening product) have super horny preview text on the large majority of their family friendly recipes?
For those of you who don’t know Kremelta, it is hydrogenated coconut oil. In Australia it’s called Copha, and according to Wikipedia it doesn’t seem to be readily available in the USA — but it’s basically vegan lard.
The Kremelta website describes their product thusly:
No-fuss vegetable shortening for home baking and cooking. From birthday parties to baking at home with mum or grandma, Kremelta has always been associated with fun, family and sweet childhood memories.
Which is super fucking creepy given that under the KIDS PARTY RECIPES section you have:
Swedish porno solarium lilestrøm & eskorte jenter i norge massasje date — Cherry Ripe Chocolate Crackles
Escorte I tromsø norsk pornografi & gratis eskorte oslo callgirls — Coconut Ice Crackle Slice
Sex dating oslo norske sexvideoer - porno homoseksuell anal ts escort — White Christmas Crackle Surprise Cake
Thai spa stavanger Norway call girls - kåte mode gamer norske amatør porno — Rainbow Teacake with vanilla frosting and M&Ms
Norske leona porno paradise hotel pupper & screw my wife please lene paradise — Unicorn & Rainbow Crackle Cups
Disappointingly, Chocolate Custard Profiteroles is just “Chocolate Custard Profiteroles”.
Going back to the Caramilk Crackle Banoffee Pie page, I opened up the Inspect tool to find out where in the page this funny filth was coming from and discovered even more seedy SEO (Search engine optimization) under the surface:
<meta name="description" content="SexNorge teen orgasmFromCoupleBondageNuruEroticDatingMatureUmeåVickyBilder av nakene damer vibrator eggTuren til Vassfjøra fra Kaldavasshytta starter med”/>
Confused (and mildly aroused) I called my friend Steve. Steve does website shit and is very good at it. I’ve worked with Steve before and can attest to his Internet magic skills. Steve’s first comment was: “What the fuck?”
Which is a fair comment.
“I haven’t even clicked on it yet, dude. I’m worried to click on it.”
Which is also fair.
After assuring Steve I wasn’t out to infect his phone with viruses or con him into my next grift, we delved under the hood of the site.
If this was a movie montage we’d be wearing hoodies, hoods up, dark lighting, monitor-illuminated faces. Panning shots with green nonsense code scrolling down the screen.
In reality we just right clicked.
First thing we learned: it’s a Wordpress site and it uses a plugin called Yoast to wrangle its meta tags. We also discovered the site was last revamped in early 2021 and the most recent post (Baileys Caramel Crackle — “escort nordland escort girls in norway livecam sex kåte gamer i tondheim”) was posted earlier this year.
“Why the fuck would they set that? The only thing I can think of is someone has fucked with Kremelta,” says Steve.
“Maybe they fucked around a dev and the dev was like ‘I’m just setting this shit in your meta tags.’”
Oh boy. Steve discounted my pet theory of Kremelta branching out to get it hits by using spurious search engine optimization (SEO), saying it would be a very unique guerrilla marketing campaign.
“You’re definitely going to attract more hits, if someone is like ‘hey, I’m looking up Swedish porn’ yeah it’s gonna help bring that up. But it’s not gonna benefit Kremelta in any way. It’s not like people are going to click through,” he says.
“Honestly, people who are looking at porn on the Internet, they’re not fucking Googling Asian porn or whatever. They’re just like: I will go to Porn Hub. I know where to get my porn.”
Steve reckons it’s an easy fix, they just have to go to each of the affected pages — by my estimate about 70% of the recipe pages — edit the tags in Yoast and hit save. Should take about a day.
“Fucking hell, I’m just amazed they haven’t noticed. How do you not pick up on that?”
As you can imagine, this was all a bit of a shock to poor Steve who grew up with a block of Copha in the fridge, never suspecting that just over the Tasman people were potentially using hydrogenated coconut oil for outrageous sexual acts.
We parted ways with him saying, “You might shake their world.”
And shake I would. With this knowledge in hand, I approached Kremelta for comment.
In the spirit of Webworm being a Voyager Award nominated publication, I did some real investigative journalisming and hopped on my bike to stake out Kremelta’s parent company Peerless Foods (The Oil Experts) HQ in Melbourne. But it was a Saturday, so not much was happening.
I did talk to a young lad who was mowing the berms of the street.
I asked him if he had seen any strange happenings around the Peerless Foods factory. He said no. I asked him if he had seen any nordic looking people lurking around. He told me that was a weird question, but no, I was the most nordic looking person he’d seen all day.
I then asked him if he thought there were any weird sex things happening in the factory. It was at this point he questioned my journalistic credentials and asked to remain anonymous. I reassured him I was working on a story for a very reputable publication, and showed him Webworm, and then the preview of Kremelta’s webpages.
We had a chuckle and the conversation drew to a natural close, both of us leaving the interaction disappointed and confused (still mildly aroused tho).
Foiled by the hegemony of Monday to Friday business hours I stewed over the weekend and called Peerless first thing Monday morning asking for comment.
I eventually got through to a spokesperson, and after explaining what Webworm was — apologising for my Kiwi accent multiple times (how can a publication which sounds like Wibwum in your native tongue be taken seriously, David?!) — I simply asked: were you aware that on the Kremelta website, there are some very sexual words hiding in the meta tags?
She said she couldn’t possibly comment because she wasn’t aware of this.
At this point I felt quite sorry for this person. It’s Monday morning. Some guy with a thick accent is accusing her family-friendly brand of having smutty SEO. What is going on? I explained to her I wasn’t looking to slam Kremelta, I just wanted to get to the bottom of this very weird mystery, and she did too.
I told her about Steve’s theory of a bored/jaded dev injecting this silly SEO.
“That would be unlikely, we used a major company to do this. But let’s wait and see.”
Imagine you’re an agency and your client calls you and is like hey, why do the SEO meta tags on my site read like a horny Norwegian AI gone rogue? But they were happy I had pointed this out.
“Thank you for letting us know, but obviously we’re a recipe site, so if there is anything there, it’s not intentional.”
“It’s just a bit weird,” she lamented.
Not wanting to stress her out too much, I put my questions and salacious screenshots in an email.
Problem is, Peerless Food’s email profanity filter bounced back my questions. Imagine me doing a chef kiss at this point.
I ended up texting the spokesperson my questions and dropping screenshots into a shared folder. I refrained from just sending her links to her own site because… I mean… I don’t know her that well 🤷🏼♂️
When they did come back to me here is what they said:
We were unaware of this SEO plugin hack and thank [JJW] for bringing it to our attention.
“We are still investigating how the tags got there but we [are] now fixing our backend code as well as increasing all our security in the site.
They also confirmed Kremelta is not sold in Norway and the spokesperson’s favourite Kremelta recipe is chocolate crackles (Budapest porn star escort real escort pov & best free porn movies sex movies tube).
I’m not convinced it’s a hack, per se.
Yoast is an open-source Wordpress plugin, and to quote Steve again that “invites dodge c--ts”. But someone at some point must’ve had access to the backend of the Kremelta site to add the tags in. I’ll follow up in a while to see if they get to the bottom of this.
The takeaway is if you run a website for a medium sized company which has a couple of household brand names in your stable of products, you should probably check the security and content of your website — it’s actually crazy this has probably been happening for about two years without anyone noticing. Steve puts it this way: “Always, always, ALWAYS have your security up-to-date” — which is probably the learning for everyone here.
They haven’t quite fixed the problem yet, so happy messaging and sharing links to your favourite sexy SEO Kremelta recipe pages with your friends and family.
That’s the end of the story for now, I’m slightly less confused (but still mildly aroused).
-Jackson Wood.
David here again.
What else is there to say, except to echo Jackson’s plea to start sharing recipes for Cherry Ripe Chocolate Crackles, Coconut Ice Crackle Slice, and White Christmas Crackle Surprise Cake with your loved ones via text, messenger and WhatsApp.
I’m very curious if this “problem” — which has gone undiagnosed for God knows how long — gets fixed anytime soon.
Let’s hope not. I have some porno homoseksuell anal to bake.
Have a great weekend,
David.
Ah yes. This is something I’ve seen quite a few times in many decades of being in I.T. and web development.
If I had a dollar for every Wordpress plug-in related hack I’ve had to clean up, I would have quite a few dollars in a bag with a large dollar sign printed on it 🤔
The ‘oh we didn’t know we had to install updates, I thought you did that!’ after the ‘we want it done cheap as possible, and the boss’s son is good with computers so he will look after it’ conversation, that gets conveniently forgotten when you send them the bill 👍
Then again this could be Big Butter trying to hack the poor olde vegans again. I like Big Butter, I cannot lie...
Oh. my. god. that was brilliant start to finish. Genuine cry-laugh inducing. I love wibwum so much.