Wait, NFL Players eat how many Uncrustables?

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy ate one at his locker before the Super Bowl. Andy Reid, the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, once offered them to his players as a reward. Before practice, during training camp and in the halftime locker room, they are a favorite of players across the NFL, a touch of childhood wrapped in plastic.

A few years ago, the Athletic wrote about orange slices, the NFL’s secret halftime snack. (Fun fact: Teams are required to provide three dozen sliced oranges for halftime for the visiting team.) But in the course of reporting that article, many NFL players said they passed on halftime citrus in favor of something else: Uncrustables, the sealed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches found in the frozen aisle of grocery stores.

At the end of the 2023 season, the Athletic tried to find out just how many Uncrustables teams in the NFL consume. And after convincing team employees that this was an honest question, most teams agreed to share their data from last year. A handful declined to participate, and a few others said they were PB&J purists who made their own sandwiches.

But based on the information collected, it is safe to say NFL teams go through 3,600 to 4,300 Uncrustables a week. When you factor in training camps and the teams that did not share their data, NFL teams easily go through at least 80,000 Uncrustables a year.

Len Kretchman, a former wide receiver at North Dakota State, lived in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and worked with schools in the food service industry. Sometime in the mid-90s, he said, his wife, Emily, suggested he create a mass-produced peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the crust.

The project appealed to Kretchman’s business instinct: a simple idea with a complex logistical problem to solve. The Kretchmans started in their kitchen with a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, a jar of jelly and a few drinks.

“We’re not re-creating the atomic bomb here,” Len Kretchman said. “We’re trying to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It was two people standing there, goofing off, probably having a beer and a glass of wine and saying, ‘What do you think of this?’ ”

The first decision they made was that the sandwich should be round.

“The moon is round, the sun is round, the Earth is round, it’s our favorite shape,” Len Kretchman said. “Do you have to go to a committee and survey people on what the shape should be? No. It’s round. So we got that nailed down.”

Next, he grabbed a cup from his kitchen cabinet.

If you asked mothers how they took the crust off a sandwich 30 years ago, he said, the answer would be: “I found a glass in my cupboard that was the right dimension, and I pressed on the bread, and I cut the crust off.’ And that’s what we did!”

They added a crimp to the edges of the crustless bread, as cooks do with pierogi and other dumplings, which was easy, but then had to figure out how to keep the jelly from oozing, which was not. Every time they thawed their creations, the jelly bled into the bread and ruined the sandwich. Much trial and error followed.

“We finally put the blob of jelly in the middle of the bread and then covered it with peanut butter and encased the jelly so it doesn’t leach into the bread,” Len Kretchman said. “That was key. That was our gee-whiz moment.”

He and his business partner, David Geske, pitched their product to schools. They needed a name. Once again, the idea landed in their kitchen. They asked the 11-year-old son of a business associate for a suggestion. His answer: The Incredible Uncrustable. Four years later, in 1999, Smuckers bought the company, dropped the first part of the name and introduced the country to the Uncrustable.

It took a little time, but the NFL was not far behind.

Uncrustables were not there when the former Pro Bowl tight end Dallas Clark was drafted by the Indianapolis Colts in 2003. Of that much he is certain. But the moment this new treat joined the food the Colts provided? He cannot really say.

All that he remembers is the feeling that something beautiful had happened.

“It’s up there with the cellphone, where you’re like, ‘How is this done?’ ” Clark said. “When they came out it was like, ‘Duh, why did someone not think of this a long time ago?’ ”

It was Jon Torine’s job to stock those snacks for the Colts. And it was an especially important job during the week of the Super Bowl in 2007 when the Colts played the Chicago Bears in Miami. In the hotel ballroom where the team stayed, Torine, the Colts’ strength and conditioning coach at the time, laid out a spread for players to grab and go as they moved from meeting to meeting.

“We were all scoopin’ and scorin’,” said Jeff Saturday, a center on that team. “We were grabbing five, six at a time.”

Clark, who struggled to keep his playing weight, would throw them in his backpack, unbothered by what would happen to them once there. “The Uncrustables always found their way to the bottom and got smashed by the playbook,” he said. “But still edible. Still in one compartment.”

Saturday said: “Didn’t matter. You could throw your playbook on top of them, didn’t make any difference. Squished, unsquished, you’re going to crush it.”

They are now a staple for many NFL teams. San Francisco tight end George Kittle eats two on flights to road games and two to four on flights home. Kansas City defensive end Mike Danna eats them at the team facility and at home. Baltimore Ravens kicker Justin Tucker grabs one from the snack table on his way to meetings. Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce claimed on his podcast that he eats more of them than “anything else in the world.”

“We’re all creatures of habit, dude,” Saturday said. “Almost freakishly. If you’re a two-Uncrustables-a-day kind of guy, that’s just what you do.”

Torine and most nutritionists would not recommend frozen, processed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as their No. 1 healthy snack option for players. But Uncrustables can do the job, especially when time is limited, and even nutritionists at the highest level of sports performance make compromises.

The bread and jelly give players quick carbohydrates. The peanut butter provides a little fat and a little protein. They are easy to digest, convenient to eat and a comfort food that players love. (There is wide disagreement as to whether grape or strawberry is the better jelly flavor – the correct answer is strawberry.)

In fact, the 2006 Colts also ate Uncrustables during halftime of the Super Bowl when they beat the Bears, 29-17.

“So maybe that was the difference,” Torine said, laughing.