UNDATED (CNN) -- If you're too lazy to use your tongue or your teeth to separate the creme from the cookie while eating Oreos, have we got machines for you.
The old way to unsandwich the crème is step one: pull apart Oreo. Step two, scrape with incisors. But now there's a more incisive way: Oreo separator machines.
Nabisco is going against its own rule by commissioning inventors to build machines designed to fiddle with the middle.
Who needs a tongue to scrape off the creme when there's this; this Rube Goldberg type contraption is one of four separator machines commissioned as part of Oreo's cookie vs. creme ad campaign. Sure there were setbacks along the way, but this is like re-inventing the wheel, the Oreo separator wheel.
Oreo found the two product developers thanks to a previous invention for which they were known. It's called, we kid you not, the ketchup crapper.
Bill Fienup and Professor Barry Kudrowitz were grad students when they designed the ketchup crapper for a competition. Now they've graduated to Oreos.
At least they didn't go hungry for the week it took them to construct this. HERB here never got hungry; HERB stands for household exploring robotic butler.
HERB has been in development for seven years at Carnegie Mellon. Oreo separating is just a sideline.