LISLE, Ill. – Nathan’s Famous, a licensed brand of Smithfield Foods, has launched a campaign for the creation of a hot dog emoji, or “picture letter” in Japanese where the word originated.
Food emojis exist for a variety of food and beverage items, but not the hot dog. “Hundreds-of-millions of tech-savvy humans text each other every minute of every day,” Nathan’s Famous explained in a news release. “A quick thumbs-up, a soccer ball, the occasional flexed-bicep or a slice of pizza, yet no one can send, perhaps one of America’s most iconic foods, the hot dog.”
So the company started its own campaign for a hot dog emoji. Interested advocates can join the campaign on the company’s Facebook page by using #HotDogEmoji.
But actually creating a hot dog emoji for texters turns out to be quite a process that likely will go through the non-profit Unicode Consortium that works to develop and maintain international software standards and data. A hot dog emoji has been among the most popular emoji requests submitted to the organization.
And the appeals may be working. A peek at the Consortium’s Pipeline Table shows what characters and scripts have been accepted for inclusion in future versions of the Unicode Standard. The table indicates the entry status of a hot dog emoji — along with a turkey emoji — is “accelerated for publication in the Unicode Standard while still in active technical ballot.”
