Off the Track and Into the Pantry
In 1958, Ross Arnott, of the Arnott’s biscuit family, was at Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Derby. The winner that year was a horse called Tim Tam. Arnott liked the name so much he filed it away for a biscuit.
That same year, Arnott’s food technologist Ian Norris was travelling the world looking for product ideas. In Britain he found the Penguin, a chocolate-coated biscuit with a cream filling, and came home determined to make a better one.
Put the two together and, on 10 September 1964, Tim Tams went on sale. Six years after the race, a Kentucky racehorse became Australia’s most beloved biscuit. These days it’s so Australian that the town of Tamworth briefly renamed itself “Tim Tamworth” to celebrate it.
The horse had a bittersweet ending of its own. Tim Tam won the Derby, then the Preakness, and went into the Belmont Stakes one race away from the Triple Crown. He was injured during the race and finished second. The horse came up just short. The biscuit, on the other hand, has been winning ever since.
Why did the name work so well? Look at its shape. Tim Tam is what linguists call a reduplicative: a word built by repeating a sound with a small change. English loves these. Ping-pong, hip-hop, zigzag, flip-flop. Notice how many sweets use the same trick: Kit Kat, Tic Tac, Tim Tam. They’re short, rhythmic, easy for a child to say and hard to forget. The vowel shifts but the rhythm stays, so the name almost sings itself.
Arnott didn’t pick it because of what it meant. Tim Tam doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t describe chocolate, crunch or cream. He picked it because of how it sounded, and probably because it came with a good story: the winner at the biggest race in America.
That’s worth remembering if you’re naming something. People agonise over what a name means. Customers mostly respond to how it sounds and how it feels to say. A name nobody can pronounce at the checkout won’t get asked for. A name that’s fun to say gets said, and a name that gets said gets remembered.
Arnott’s could have called it the Chocolate Cream Sandwich, which would have been accurate, descriptive and forgotten by Christmas. They called it after a racehorse, and sixty years later the whole country knows the name.
