With a big fat capital P.

As in a Phillies logo for everyone to see.

That is, until yesterday, when I saw this: Click here to continue reading

That is, until yesterday, when I saw this:  Click here to continue reading

Your team is toast!

The hosts of “The View” TV show just told us so this morning.

Everyone seems to be talking about these new toasters. They are hot. They toast your bread, your English Muffin, your frozen waffle — and the best part is that it produces your favorite Major League Baseball team’s logo on one side.

“You don’t have to be a fan to love this,” said Josh Fink, CEO of Pangea Brands, but since we are all fans here and we eat, sleep and breathe baseball, we had to know more about the latest rage. So we bought one of our own, tried it out at home, and found it to be a little too … fun. We made more toast than we really had appetite to eat, because, frankly, we were just having a great time putting a particular team’s logo on food.

“What a great way to wake up on Saturday morning and your favorite team is emblazoned on your bread,” Fink said. “It’s comedy. We are taking this to the next level, too. This is the lower model. We have one $60 or $70 coming out, chrome. It’s kind of hard not to say it’s a fun item.”

Fink sold 350 units in five minutes recently on Home Shopping Network.

“The market is saturated, all the same stuff — enough T-shirts and caps,” Fink said, referring to the popular standards at the Shop. “When it comes to the novelty market, we are all looking for the most creative thing. You look at the Silly Bandz and think, ‘Why?’ It makes no sense to parents. But things hit. This is utilitarian, yet whimsical. It’s a product that can live and breathe in any house. You don’t necessarily have to be a fan to love this. It’s not the most expensive toaster in the world, and in some ways, it’s a toaster, but not a toaster; it’s fun.”

Some people have speculated that the idea came from that infamous eBay auction of the toast that supposedly bore a likeness of the Virgin Mary. Bidding hit the $22,000 mark before eBay ultimately removed the item as a prank. Fink said that wasn’t it.

The Japanese line of “Hello Kitty” merchandise was the inspiration.

“The way we came about this was seeing a ‘Hello Kitty’ verse on a toaster,” Fink explained. “I was looking for cool new products, and I had seen this ‘Hello Kitty’ toaster for years while on visits to Japan. I was like, ‘Hello Kitty?’ It should have Red Sox on it. It should have Yankees.

“In the back of my mind, I always thought we should do this. One day it clicked. I thought someone already had done this, but they hadn’t. I approached Major League Baseball and they were excited about it. It took us nine months to get it made and we’re still learning.”

But why just make your own NFL friendly food? You, too, could become an official product of the league.

“For $139.99, you can become an NFL-licensed product and collectible,” said Mike Denton, director of e-commerce for Facility Merchandising Inc., the Woodland Hills, Calif., company that has been running official NFL Super Bowl shops for more than 20 years.

The company, headed by Scott native Milt Arenson, has a 30,000-square-foot store selling all things NFL at the NFL Experience, a sort of fan festival at the Dallas Convention Center.

At two booths set up by iAM 3D, fans can have their pictures taken with technology used in video games and have their heads turned into 4-inch high statuettes wearing their favorite team’s colors. The product is called. “The Warrior.”

“This is drawing a lot of attention,” Denton said. “We’re getting people in here just for this.”

It’s not as though the store needs to go trolling for customers, seeing as how it is conveniently located where fans exit the NFL Experience exhibits.

The league had been projecting that 250,000 people would come through the NFL Experience this year. Even if that number drops as a result of the treacherous weather that froze North Texas this week, Denton said an estimated 70 to 80 percent of those who come are expected to check out the store.

At Cowboys Stadium, FMI has taken over the two-level team store and put most of the same 200,000 different pieces of merchandise out for customers. In addition, there are as many as 30 smaller shops scattered around the concourses and through the stadium. More than 100,000 people are expected at the game and, again, the vast majority are expected to swing by one of the shops.

Just like everything else around the Super Bowl, it is a big-league operation. There are 26 registers set up in the checkout area at the NFL Experience store alone, and many of the cashiers hired to run them are members of the Reserve Officers Training Corps at the University of Texas, Arlington.

The strategy here is to give people as much “stadium exclusive” merchandise as possible so they will have something that those who didn’t make it to North Texas don’t. Of course, the company also sells some of that exclusive merchandise at stadiumcollection.com.

FMI and the NFL are trying concept shops for the first time this year, sort of stores-within-the-store setups that vendors had to bid on. In addition to the iAM 3D shop, there is a full, working kitchen display area where the logo-branding toasters are flanked by shot glasses, logo-adorned straws and clocks.

Victoria’s Secret became a NFL licensee last year and has set up a heavily pink section featuring $35 T-shirts that say things such as “Pink loves the Steelers” and “Pink loves the Packers.”

Denton said business surpassed expectations last weekend — before the ice storm — and his theory is that many of those customers were from the region. Sales of Kansas City Chiefs and St. Louis Rams gear have been good.

The best-selling merchandise has been the stuff with logos from both Super Bowl teams, such as hats in the $30 to $40 range that show both the Steelers and Packers logos.

The store started with 2,500 special Super Bowl XLV patches available to put on $120 player jerseys — the staff does it in the back with heat-and-seal equipment — and those aren’t sealed on too far ahead, so there’s room to adapt to what the shoppers want.

At the moment, Green Bay linebacker Clay Matthews is outselling Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers. On the Steelers side, safety Troy Polamalu is ahead of the rest of his team “by far,” Denton said.

This weekend will mark the busy season for this very short-term retail operation. The aisles are wide, but, if the crush hits as expected, it won’t matter.

“On Saturday, you won’t be able to walk in here,” he predicted.

~ Teresa Lindeman:

Starting in May, Pangea will roll out ProToast, a line of toasters – available in every team from the four major sports – that pops out with the teams logo burned into it.

“Our motto is ‘Toast Your Team,’” Fink says.

Fink has big plans for the toast market.

He’s working on coming up with FDA-approved magic markers so that kids can color their toast and a collegiate logo toast product, called UToast, will hit stores in the fall.

Next year, he hopes to unveil a licensed panini press and a waffle maker and says it’s possible that one day we might see his toasters branding the faces of particular players into the bread.

The toasters are available in the online shops of the major sports Web sites as well as at Modell’s, Dick’s Sporting Goods and The Sports Authority and retail for $34.99.