I recently had the opportunity to listen as a product development team analyzed the new Pop Tarts brand extension from Kellogg's Pop Tarts Crunch Cereal. Frankly, everyone was left shaking their heads! If you read the package copy on the box, the "story" rolls out about "filled" centers in the little pieces of cereal. It gives one the impression Kellogg has mastered the technique of putting a real fruit filling into each individual little bitty piece. "Not so," said the team members, who are not directly involved with cereals. It looks like little more than a shot of food dye or flavor in the center. Certainly the consistency is not one of a coating around an inner layer of fruit, but one of cereal throughout, with a shot of color in the middle. And since there are cereals with fruit "surprises" in the middle, the technology apparently does exist to put real fruit in the center. How does a respected company do something like this? Did the cereal exit out of the laboratory, and then did someone try to think up what to call to create a stir in the hotly competitive cereal market? Was it really the best answer to the quest for a miniature Pop Tart? Or did someone in copy writing get carried away with the "wish list" of the food engineers who created this new cereal, and nobody noticed that what was written wasn't right? Only those in the top echelons of the Kellogg Company are "in the know." Certainly, those who like Pop Tarts toaster pastries will try this new cereal. It's available in Frosted Strawberry and Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon, and may well be a it. It will be interesting to watch.
And I am still scratching my head about the two Wheaties "limited edition" cereals, Dunk-A-Balls and the newest, Quarterback Crunch. They are shaped like basketballs and footballs, respectively, complete with the lacing lines on each individual piece. But three things amaze me.
1) What are these doing as brand extensions of Wheaties in the first place? Neither is a flake cereal. Wheaties is!
2) The Dunk-A-Balls turned soggy in milk so quickly that my 4- year-old grandson wouldn't finish his medium-size portion.
3) Both packages are designed to turn into toys at the breakfast table. One becomes a basketball hoop you throw cereal at to "make a basket." The other turns into goal posts; you flick cereal through them, into the bowl.
Hasn't anybody told the folks at General Mills it is hard enough to get kids to eat properly? Few mothers or fathers encourage their children to play with their food at the table. When I was growing up, the often-heard reprimand was, "Don't play with your food! Eat it!" And whether you liked it or not, you ate it.
Now -- perhaps to be politically correct -- we don't "reprimand" our children anymore. We just let them throw food around the breakfast table. To heck with eating it -- and it gets soggy in the bottom of the bowl!
Robert McMath is a new-product consultant and director of the New Products Showcase & Learning Center in Ithaca, N.Y.
