Chef Excellence ('An Excellent X')

About

Chef Excellence is a character used to endorse the "Stay Fresh System" bags, which are supposed to keep food fresh for a lengthier period of time. The character endorsed the bags with the slogan "An Excellent Product." The character has been parodied in a number of exploitable parodies and videos since being introduced to the internet by YouTuber Dr. Ashen in 2010.

Origin

On August 6th, 2005, a photo of a man with his chef costume was taken and posted on iStockPhoto.com. The photo would later be adopted by PMS International, who put it on the boxes of the Stay Fresh System bags under the name of "Chef Excellence."

The actual photo of Chef Excellence

Spread

On January 8th, 2010, British comedian Dr. Ashen^[1] reviewed one of the Stay Fresh System products called "Stay Fresh Cheese Bags" (shown below, left). On January 27th, he uploaded another video reviewing the Stay Fresh products, increasing the popularity of Chef Excellence (shown below, right). In both videos, he joked about the character Chef Excellence. In his second video, he opened with a title card reading "Chef Excellence: An excellent idea for a video."

Ashens continued making parodies regarding Chef Excellence over the years. Other examples include a March 21st, 2013 cartoon parody of the character that gained over 230,000 views (shown below, left) and a puppet parody uploaded on his extraashens channel that gained over 300,000 views (shown below, right).

Additionally, numerous exploitables were created using the logo. Examples include a February 3rd, 2017 post by user Heroicshrub in /r/meirl^[2] that gained over 2,000 points (shown below, left) and a Me Gusta parody created by KnowYourMeme user HybridXephyr (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References