Analyzing The Fictional Brands of Breaking Bad & Better Call Saul
Breaking Bad and its prequel show Better Call Saul are more than just your average crime dramas. They manage to do something that most franchise’s never do, which is create their own unique and memorable world. The Breaking Bad universe has its own distinct setting, easily identifiable both visually and tonally.
Part of this is of course the location. Having the show be in the city of Albuquerque was one of the best decisions the showrunners made. Not only was Albuquerque a mostly unknown location that viewers could associate primarily with the show, the desert landscape of New Mexico created a distinct neo-western vibe that set Breaking Bad apart from the multitude of crime shows set in New York or Los Angeles.
However another aspect of the worldbuilding of the Breaking Bad universe is the original brands that the show creates. There are plenty of real life locations as well, but the show makes use of several recurring original businesses to flesh out the world and make it seem like it’s own distinct universe. And in this video, I’ll be breaking down some of these businesses, and examining what exactly they add to the franchise.
One of the defining brands of the show is Blue Sky, the signature meth produced by Walt and Jesse. After switching to a P2P cook to avoid the trouble of getting pseudo, the new process results in their meth being colored blue.
Because of the incredible purity of the product along with its distinct appearance, Blue Sky becomes the most sought after meth in the world. It’s so highly prized that other dealers like Duncan dyed their meth with food coloring to make it look like Walt’s. When Lydia expanded the operation to the Czech republic, she insisted that they get the color right because the brand had become so popular even in Europe.
The blue coloring of the meth is an invention of the show. In real life, a pure product like Walt’s would appear colorless. However the creators wanted Walt’s product to be easily identifiable, and they definitely succeeded. It is such a well known symbol of the show, that even other media like the Walking Dead, Arrow, and even video games like Payday 2 have featured the blue meth.
Another popular symbol of the show is Los Pollos Hermanos, the fried chicken restaurant that Gustavo Fring owns and operates. It’s easily one of if not the most identifiable symbols of the show, and is featured prominently throughout both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
The restaurant acts as a front for Gus’s meth empire in the southwest, allowing him to distribute drugs without drawing attention. Gus’s dedication in building this operation out over decades is part of his long term scheme to get revenge on the cartel for killing Max, his former partner and the other chicken brother shown in the logo.
However the restaurant is also a source of pride for Gus. He takes the standards and quality of the restaurant extremely seriously, and the franchise is considered a genuine part of the food culture of the city. Perhaps Gus does this because he’s a perfectionist in all things, or it might be to honor the memory of Max, who was the chef at their original location in Mexico.
The next business I want to talk about is Venezia’s Pizzeria, a restaurant referenced multiple times in Breaking Bad and in Better Call Saul. It’s a pizza place with a unique twist, it doesn’t slice the pizza before serving, instead leaving it as one whole pie. Apparently this is done to save money on preparation costs.
There is actually a meta reason for this quirk. In Season 3, Walt brings a pizza to the house in order to try and reconcile with Skyler. When this fails, he angrily throws the pizza onto the roof, and quite humorously, the pizza lands completely intact. This is classic Breaking Bad humor, but it only works if the pizza is unsliced, which is unusual for most large pizzas. There are some restaurants that leave their pizzas whole, but it’s rare and viewers of the show questioned why the pizza wasn’t sliced.
So in Season 4, the writers wrote in an explanation that Venezia’s Pizza doesn’t slice their pizzas in order to pass on the savings to the customer. This again is quite funny, and Jesse rightly questions how much money that could possibly save. This is further referenced in Better Call Saul, with Neff the owner of the copy machine store ordering a pizza from there and specifically asking for it to be sliced for him.
Speaking of restaurants, I want to give a quick shout out to Taco Cabeza. When Walt sets up the drug deal with Tuco, he arranges to meet in a junkyard in the middle of nowhere. Jesse complains that they should have met somewhere public like Taco Cabeza.
Not only is this used to show how uninformed Walt is at drug dealing at this point, it also has profound consequences for the series. The remote location allows Tuco to kill his associate No Doze, which leads directly to him kidnapping Walt and Jesse and setting off the search for them that would eventually unravel everything. All that because Walt didn’t meet at Taco Cabeza.
The restaurant is also mentioned in Better Call Saul as being near Saul’s office.
Moving on from restaurants, I wanted to mention Tampico Furniture. After nearly killing Krazy 8 in the pilot, Walt is left with a decision about what to do with him when he survives. Krazy 8 reveals that his name is Domingo Molina, and that his family owns Tampico Furniture, a store where Walt bought his son’s crib when he was a baby.
The story not only shows that Walt and Domingo’s lives had crossed paths before, just like it would in a smaller town like Albuqueue, it’s also a symbol of Domingo’s innocence, which he plays to try and convince Walt to let him live. It’s the simple life he could have lived if he never went into crime. This parallels not only Walt’s decision to go into crime instead of sticking with his dead-end teaching job, but also Nacho’s relationship to his father and the upholstery store in Better Call Saul.
When we see Domingo in Better Call Saul, he’s wearing a Tampico furniture shirt. He’s also noticeably more timid in the prequel, showing that he didn’t start out as the gangster we see in Breaking Bad. Like Nacho and Jesse, he started out as an innocent kid, but gradually became corrupted by his life of crime.
And after Walt kills Domingo, his innocence is ended as well. Though it was in self defense, we’re later shown that very crib he bought from Tampico, and reminded that Walt killed someone’s baby, which would not be the last time.
Finally to wrap things up, let’s talk about Zafiro Anejo, the tequila brand invented for the show. Meaning Sapphire in English, Zafiro is an extremely expensive and luxurious tequila. It was used by Gus as a gift for Don Eladio, which was secretly poisoned and ended up killing the leaders of the cartel.
The reason why the drink was invented for the show, is because they were unable to find any real tequila companies that would allow their product to be shown poisoning people. While I can definitely understand that, in hindsight the popularity of Breaking Bad would have probably resulted in more sales.
It’s also a favorite drink of Jimmy and Kim in Better Call Saul. They first try the tequila when they scam Ken the Stockbroker into buying them a bottle, and after that the drink becomes a symbol of the fun they have with scams. The decorative bottle topper is a recurring symbol of corruption in both of their stories from that point on.
However Better Call Saul also creates some continuity issues for Zafiro Anejo. In Breaking Bad, the tequila is said to be extremely expensive and rare. Don Eladio acts with joy and surprise when Gus brings it to him, which is part of why he drinks it despite the risk.
In Better Call Saul, even though it’s portrayed as expensive as far as normal tequilas go, it’s not nearly as expensive as it should be. The bar they go to serves $50 dollar shots of Zafiro, and while that might sound like a lot, remember that a small bottle like that would probably fill less than 20 shots. When Don Eladio has the drink poured, he only brings out 12 shot glasses, which is probably about how much it could fill. That means that at $50 dollars a shot, the bottle would only cost around $600, even less when you consider that restaurants markup the price of alcohol as much as 500% in some cases, which would put the price closer to around $200 a bottle.
This is further corroborated when Jimmy buys a bottle of Zafiro Anejo at a liquor store for $495. And it’s not the only one he buys in the series. He also gets another bottle in the third season when he thinks Sandpiper is going to settle. If broke ass Jimmy McGill can buy multiple bottles of the stuff, do you really think the leader of the Mexican Cartel is going to be impressed with it? Lalo brought him a 1983 Ferarri as a gift, a bottle you can get at Bevmo is not going to cut it.
For context, the design of the bottle is said to be based on Hardy Perfection series of Cognac. In real life bottles of this sell for tens of thousands of dollars, which is much more in line with what a crime boss like Eladio would be drinking. However I think they just wanted a recurring symbol for Jimmy and Kim to drink in the show, and didn’t think too much about how it would affect the continuity.
Overall though, I hope I’ve shown you how these fictional brands help flesh out the world of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. These businesses and products serve as worldbuilding, the same way something like Valyrian Steel does in Game of Thrones. It makes the settings of these series feel distinct, closer to its own unique world than just its real life location. Basically I’m saying Breaking Bad is a fantasy series.
