Red velvet, a type of cake flavored with chocolate and red food coloring, is very popular for some reason. With Oreo introducing novelty flavors for what seems like every holiday and season, the idea of red velvet cookies for Valentine’s Day isn’t completely unreasonable. Yet some college students confessed to creating the product as a marketing class assignment. Was that confession simply meant to throw dessert detectives off the trail?

The idea has been floating around since Nabisco started its current run of holiday novelty Oreos, and the Facebook page was born shortly before Valentine’s Day of 2014. It mostly consisted of pictures of Oreos tinted red using an image-editing program. Months later, the account owner came back and posted that the product was all a class assignment.

Earlier this month, a photo of a realistic-looking Oreo package appeared on Twitter. Then it disappeared. The Verge evaluated the evidence, originally declaring that the package size doesn’t match that of previous novelty Oreo flavors, and that the flavor profile of red choco-wafer cookies and cream cheese-flavored filling doesn’t follow Nabisco’s normal M.O. of pairing a novelty filling with existing chocolate or vanilla-flavored cookies.

These arguments don’t work, though: readers pointed out that white cream cheese-flavored “creme” is plausible, and the only difference between chocolate cookie wafers and red velvet cookie wafers is some red dye. Also, it may help that The Verge obtained a photo of a great big pile of those 10-ounce sample packs.

Nabisco, true to form, isn’t saying anything either way. Therefore, we have to declare this flavor more likely than Fried Chicken Oreos, but we can’t make a definitive ruling about how real it could be until either more samples appear on the streets, or Nabisco makes an official announcement.

Naturally, there’s now a Change.org petition pleading with Nabisco to make Red Velvet Oreos real.

Is the ‘Red Velvet’ Oreo real? [The Verge]

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