Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

The Adorable Reason You Can Set Your Alert Sound to “Hummus” on Slack

Sometimes (okay, a lot of the time), if I’m in the middle of editing or writing, I don’t always notice when someone else on my team is trying to communicate with me via Slack, the popular work messaging app.

Thinking I could fix things by tinkering with the notification settings (perhaps more popups, a louder noise?), I made an amusing discovery. Amongst the options of “Ding,” “Boing,” “Woah!” and even “Knock Brush” (the default and our News editor’s favorite), Slack also offers the option of getting your attention by saying “hummus.”

A lover of all things chummus (chickpeas), I decided to investigate.

The reason Slack has this feature, it seems, is super adorable:

Who is Anna? Anna Pickard is Slack’s editorial director who apparently delighted her coworkers with her (now readily accessible) pronunciation of the word hummus. In June, Anna tweeted a photo of her Slack notification options, adding, “Fact: My notification noise on Slack is set to Hummus’, a notification only available to us. Of me, saying hummus.”

Soon after, like the best whipped chickpea spread, the plot thickened: Paul Betts, a software developer for Slack, jumped in to inform her that the setting wasn’t as exclusive as she thought:

Some people, not content with an already beautiful thing, asked: why hummus?

The answer, as those of us who work with Brits (or have ever watched the BBC) know, was obvious — but Slack’s Senior Content Director Matt Haughey stated it for good measure:


Update: On December 28, I reached out to Slack’s PR team for the inside scoop. On December 29, I got a reply from Julia Blystone, who confirmed that the voice does indeed belong to Pickard, “one of Slack’s earliest employees, who helped create Slack’s brand personality and voice.”

Blystone added that “One of our colleagues, Myles Grant, who’s an engineer and another of Slack’s first employees, loved the way she said ‘hummus’, so they recorded it and made it an option for the notification tone. It has been available for 18 months internally only (and was really an Easter Egg even within Slack) and was just released recently to all teams.”

Sounds like another audibly delectable mystery solved.

Laura E. Adkins is the Forward’s contributing network editor. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @Laura_E_Adkins.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.