Kuai Kuai
A puffed corn snack made by the Taiwanese food company Kuai Kuai Co., Ltd. (乖乖股份有限公司); not a potato chip but a slender, stick-shaped corn snack. In Taiwan it is widely known, among IT engineers above all, for a charm or superstition: place a green-packaged bag of it beside a server, a computer, a factory control panel or other machine, and "the machine will keep running normally".
Why green
Only the green-packaged Kuai Kuai is used for this charm. On most machines the lamp that indicates normal operation is green, while yellow and red indicate faults and errors, so the package placed next to the machine, it is said, must be green too.
The Kuai Kuai brand itself assigns a different role to each color: the yellow package is aimed at wealth and the financial industry, and the red package stands for "love" and is sold as a limited edition for Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. The one used as a charm for machines is, among these, the green-packaged product alone.
Rules for placing it
Simply placing it is not enough. Leaving an expired bag in place is said to be forbidden, and the custom is to replace it promptly with a new one once it passes its best-before date. Eating the charm by mistake, or tidying it away without permission, is treated as taboo and is said to have caused trouble in workplaces.
Origins of the brand
The company's predecessor was Nan Fang Hang, a pharmaceutical wholesaler founded in 1956 by Liao Chin-kang; by the mid-1960s it was also making medicines, but in 1968 it switched to food manufacturing and launched products under the Kuai Kuai brand as children's snacks in 1969. The name "乖乖" itself is a Chinese expression meaning "be a good child" or "behave yourself", and besides serving as a name for a children's snack, it is overlaid with the wish that the machine will "behave and keep running normally". In 1974 the company formally changed its name to Kuai Kuai as well.
To verify
- No primary source has been confirmed for when and where the custom of placing Kuai Kuai next to machines spontaneously began (some information says records can be confirmed from around 2008, but whether it goes back further is unknown)
- How far the custom of treating eating or tidying it away as taboo is generally shared from one workplace to another
References
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