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ASHBURN, Va. — Long before Mark Clouse took control of a Washington Commanders rebrand as team president by combining their burgundy and gold to restore an iconic look, he sought to combine two other elements — chocolate and peanut butter — to energize another popular brand: Oreo cookies. And, just like that, the Reese’s Oreo cookie was born in 2014.
"It was like lightning in a bottle," said Clouse, then an executive vice president at Mondelez International. "People were over the moon." It wasn't the only time Clouse served as a taster for new food products in his career, but with Oreo it was different. There were hundreds of new flavor possibilities for the product, which had been around since 1912.
In many ways these tastings — and knowing the value of maintaining a brand's appeal — helped Clouse when he was named the Commanders' president in 2025 and led a uniform rebrand this spring. "If you're changing or evolving brands, there's rules of the road: You never want to change too much at the same time, you always want to preserve core equities," Clouse said.
For Oreo, that meant pairing the cookie with other recognizable brands and preserving the rituals consumers associated with it. For the Commanders, it means reconnecting with elements of the franchise's past while establishing a clearer identity for the future.
Clouse said being in charge of rebranding Oreo flavors — and other foods over the years — helped shape his mindset when it came time for the Commanders to introduce a new look. And that prior experience led Clouse back to an old look for the franchise. He said with Oreos, for example, rituals were part of the experience: twist, lick and dunk. With football fans, the shared experience could be unique with individual rituals but the joint one would be with having the marching band or singing the team's fight song after touchdowns.
"What I find really important, if you're going to market a brand of any sort, you need to know what your equity and your framework is to operate in," Clouse said. "Or you end up with what a lot of brands do, which is just whatever seems cool or fun, I'm doing it. And whether or not it relates to the brand I have or not, who cares? We're just going to have fun. But what happens is you wake up over time and you haven't really built any equity."
Clouse wanted to build up that equity last season with the Commanders by, first, defining the name that they started using in 2022. Then, as with Oreo's blue packaging, Clouse wanted Washington's look to be consistent — as it had been before the name change. They incorporated their past when possible — using a medieval spear on their alternate helmets; a spear with a feather dangling from it once adorned their helmet from 1965 to 1969.
But a consistent look was pivotal.
"We want the same burgundy every time," Clouse said. "If you see Oreo cookies, you're going to see that Oreo blue. We were four or five different shades of burgundy and red, and it wasn't consistent." Oreo wasn't just about adding flavors. It had to be "something else iconic," Clouse said.
Thus began an adventure of tastings for Clouse and a group that could number between 15-20 people — from food scientists to marketers to salespeople. But Clouse was the one to greenlight any new flavor, and they always wanted to have perhaps 30 to 50 in development to drop when needed. They wanted to create mystery: What flavor was next? And demand: They'd pull flavors after a brief period. There was Nutella and Swedish fish and birthday cake — the first new flavor introduced in 2012 as part of a 100-year celebration — and red velvet. For Clouse, it wasn't exactly the diet of champions. There was a steady stream of workers dropping by his office with more possibilities.
"When I first started it there would be cookies on my desk every day. I gained 10 pounds," Clouse said. "And I was still exercising!"
So, after six months, rather than taste five or six new flavors daily, he settled for doing so one day each month. During the tastings, Clouse wanted everyone to follow a ritual that he said the consumer typically does with an Oreo: break off the top half of the cookie, lick the cream and dunk it in a glass of milk. Turns out Clouse, a former basketball player for Army, wasn't a big dunker. At least not during the tastings: He said the milk could dull his taste buds. Instead, he treated it almost like a wine tasting, going through the ritual, taking a bite and then cleansing his palate with water. Other times he'd eat a cracker to help cleanse. Some days he'd taste 30 or 40 different flavors.
"I don't expect to get a lot of sympathy on being forced to eat Oreos," Clouse said. There were surprises, like candy corn. "I never thought it would work, but it worked," he said. "… We literally sold out of them. It went only to Target at the time. It was like a Target exclusive. We sold it out in like two days."
There were rejections, including bacon.
"At the time, bacon and sweet bacon or bacon on things that were sweet was just growing," Clouse said. "And you couldn't deliver the authenticity of a bacon like a smoked bacon flavor in the creams. I never felt like we could get that quite right, but I tasted it."
And there were favorites.
"I really liked the dulce de leche version that went to South America," Clouse said. "And I'm biased a little bit on Reese's because that was kind of the original.
"We did a banana pudding and a golden Oreo. Pretty delicious." Hormel Foods president John Ghingo worked with Clouse at Mondelez and often participated in the tastings, sometimes in different countries when introducing new products.
"He would have a lot of fun with tastings. He enjoyed it," Ghingo said. "I do think he was good at it. He had very good instincts for food and what would work. He had very good instincts for what the consumer would like. He would dive into the cookies, like he was a little kid, he would enjoy them, he'd have fun with them. He'd try all the flavors. He loved talking about the flavors. He always had a smile on his face. He was not just eating the cookie, but he was using it as a way to also connect with the people."
Clouse said that what he loved about Oreo — and yes, he still eats them — is that the brand could bring people together no matter the country, bonding over the ritual or the flavors.
Clouse also worked for Kraft Foods and, before joining the Commanders, Pinnacle Foods; he helped taste new flavors there as well and, probably without needing to, said tasting Oreos was better than "tasting mayo." That work experience taught him how to treat a brand that meant so much to so many. He has also learned one difference in food branding vs. an NFL team.
"People like Oreo cookies, they like Campbell Soup," he said. "[But] they love their football team."
