Posts tagged “cereal”

Out and About: Steve in Portland/San Diego/Denver

Last week I hit three cities, doing workshops and fieldwork; in hotel rooms, airports, homes, restaurants and the like. Here are some of my photos from a very busy trip.

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Hotel restaurant point-of-sale user interface. So many amazingly awful things here. The help button is labeled “HELP!!!!!”; Cobb Salad (I’m sorry, Fiesta Cobb) is $12.00?

raisins
Without raisins? Now with extra raisins!

kiosk
There used to be a baggage kiosk. Now there’s just a sign.

dancing
I found Jonathan Borofsky’s “The Dancers” in downtown Denver to be vaguely unsettling.

wall
Controls removed for your convenience.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • Reasonable Consumer Would Know "Crunchberries" Are Not Real, Judge Rules – Judge England also noted another federal court had "previously rejected substantially similar claims directed against the packaging of Fruit Loops [sic] cereal, and brought by these same Plaintiff attorneys." He found that their attack on "Crunchberries" should fare no better than their prior claims that "Froot Loops" did not contain real froot.

    (via BoingBoing)

  • A Manhattan Writing Of Six Therapists – “Everybody comes in with their own stories, and they can be so staggeringly original,” said Bonnie Zindel, the psychoanalyst who started the writing group seven years ago. “We all need stories to make sense of our lives, we’re all wired to tell stories, and nature gave us that. For us, we wonder, ‘What is the story that our patients are telling?’ There are mother stories, father stories, ghost stories and the eternal universal story of a child trying to separate from its mother.”
  • 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive – Read this post now, it won't last long! Most of our readers – including people like you – are already choosing to look at this post.

    (Lone Gunman, I'm giving you folks credit for this and look forward to you reciprocating, thanks!)

Fruit 2.0

It’s great to see an awareness of user experience popping up in humble, low-tech places. Grabbing an apple yesterday, I discovered the small arrow pictured below at the top of the sticker, telling me exactly how to get the label off my fruit. Delightful. No apple under my fingernails on this one.

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User Interface

And last week, I had another fruit-related experience that, while not as unequivocally positive, was still thought-provoking.

I poured myself a bowl of cereal-no raisins. Looked all through the plastic liner bag-no raisins. Figured I had defective cereal. Then I noticed a little yellow callout on the box-“Stay Fresh Fruit Pouch Inside Box.”

Sure enough, there it was at the bottom of the box-a silver foil pouch full of raisins. The experience promised by Health Valley on the pouch: eternally fresh, plump raisins and my choice as to the cereal/raisin ratio for each bowl.

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Custom Cereal

While I still think I prefer having my cereal pre-mixed and ready-to-pour, I do appreciate the concept of this approach-the appeal to freshness and personal tailoring. Though I’d suggest that Health Valley do a better job calling attention to their packaging system, so that people don’t have to go through the same terrible moment of perceived raisinlessness that I did.

Foreign Grocery Sp@m

Hot on the heels of my Foreign Grocery Museum article in Ambidextrous Magazine, I received a piece of spam informing me of the availability of Poppins cereals in Kuwait.

I really like their enthusiastic descriptions of the benefits provided: true value for the money, great morning start, all the energy it needs, essential for the growth of children, etc.

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And if we needed further proof that they were watching this blog, the email asked me to take a survey about Poppins. We [heart] surveys!

Reframe as healthy

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Here’s our latest breakfast cereal freebie…a pedometer (referred to as a step counter, since Kellogg’s probably doesn’t want to offer pedo-anything). They’ve associated their cereal with healthfulness. Not exercise, of course, because that isn’t really what they’d want to tell young kids to do, but they’ve now associated themselves with mindfulness of activity. It’s an interesting move that I can’t help both admire and feel cynical towards.

On the subject of me: Five Things

Troy Worman pings me for this new-ritual blogger effort (it’s called a meme, but is a chain letter a meme? The propagation is built-in, rather than being a side-effect of the compellingness of the content….) where you post “five things” about yourself. And then tag a bunch of other bloggers to do the same thing.

There’s no threat of deadly peril as in old-school chain letters, so that’s nice. But I’ve found it a bit exclusive. The “cool” folks got pinged months ago with this thing. In the interest of inclusiveness, I’m going to throw this open to anyone who wants to contribute their own five things. If you’ve got your own blog and want to participate, consider this your opportunity. Email me, or trackback, or comment, and I’ll add you to the body of this post. If you don’t have a blog (and let’s face it, most don’t) then leave your five things in the comments. If you want them anonymized more than the blog will let you, email me, and I’ll post it for you.

Five things about Steve

  1. In my public school (called elementary school in the US) the default assumption was that boys took shop and girls took home economics. I was the first boy to take home-ec. I simply asked. They weren’t trying to stop me, but they were very worried when they called my mother to verify this was acceptable. If it had been 10 years later, they would have drafted a release from liability, just in case. The next year, of course, all students took both. I was no Rosa Parks, but I did create a small change that was past due.
  2. Our dog Brody (Golden Retriever, 5 1/2, rescued) is my first pet (I’m not counting several goldfish named George).
  3. Back in the 90s, Tom Williams and I tapped into the latent storytelling need that would re-emerge as blogging when we created Turn Signals. A fax (originally) newsletter that took stories from the press and rewrote them in a dryly bemused tone. Indeed, we were always passing photocopied articles to each other in the office and so it was suggested that we productize it. You can see a few issues here (PDF).
  4. I really like cereal. I have my preferred cereal system, where boxes are stored in a cabinet from oldest to newest, so nothing goes stale. I like to have two boxes open at one time; where one is sweeter and the other is healthier (although they are all pretty damn sweet these days).
  5. In 1992 I started the first online community for Rolling Stones fans. It’s still going to this day.

Help Lucky See The Future!


Yeah, dude. Keep eating sugar cereal like this and you’re going to have a serious diabetes problem. You already look like you’re suffering from ADD. You (or your guardian) might want to have a doctor check that out.

Ridges that Rock?


Golden Grahams specifies in small type that they are a Ridged Cereal. Umm, okay.


And then later they claim that they come with Ridges that Rock!

Really? They are going to hang their hat on a lame-ass claim like that? Golden Grahams can be said to be many things (delicious, crunchy, sugar-tastic, part of this complete breakfast) but they absolutely can not in any sense be said to “rock.” The possession of ridges, or lack thereof, does not in anyway influence the “rock”ingness of cereal.

Golden Grahams do not rock. Their ridges do not rock.

This is patently a false claim.

Spark creativity with Froot Loops? WTF!


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This is bizarre. As if food isn’t expensive enough, Kellogg’s is encouraging kids to do (dumb-ass) crafts projects with Froot Loops. On the back of a box are detailed instructions for Rainbow Layer Art (crush a bunch of Froot Loops and layer each color in a jar) and Tambourine Shaker (put Froot Loops between paper plates).

As my mother would say “Ants will come!” You’re going to put highly-sugared cereal into toys that will sit in bedrooms and livingrooms and playrooms? One is made of crumbs (guaranteed to leak) and the other involves percussing individual Loops obviously creating more crumbs (which will also leak). You’ll have Froot crap all over your house and an immediate infestation of ants, not to mention sticky galore.

The idea is so head-shakingly inappropriate. Why are they suggesting that their cereal (nutrition, sustenance, expensive) is in itself a plaything? Doesn’t that just send every wrong signal to a kid? People are starving in Biafra and you are wasting your breakfast cereal as decoration? It reveals how non-food companies like Kellogg’s really think their product is. It’s just a substance to be manufactured and distributed. It’s not an edible commodity, it’s just some coloring that can be chewed, put in a jar and displayed, or hey, made into a musical instrument. Floor wax or desert topping, anyone?

I mean, really.

Serving Good Intentions by the Bowlful – New York Times


The New York Times looks more closely at the “alternative” breakfast cereals, including where the money goes, what ingredients they contain, what those ingredients do or don’t deliver, and who really owns these companies.

General Mills owns Cascadian Farm, and the name behind Kashi is Kellogg. Barbara’s Bakery is owned by Weetabix, the leading British cereal company, which is owned by a private investment firm there. Mother’s makes clear that it is owned by Quaker Oats (which is owned by PepsiCo). Health Valley and Arrowhead Mills are owned by a natural food company traded on the Nasdaq, Hain Celestial Group; H. J. Heinz owns 16 percent of that company.

The cereals sold under the Peace label are owned by Golden Temple, a for-profit company owned by a nonprofit group founded by the late Yogi Bhajan, who made his fortune from Yogi Tea, Kettle Chips and a company that provides security services.

Of the companies that made the cereals tested, only Nature’s Path, a Canadian company, has no parent company.

Don Sayles, a retired manufacturer and typical New York skeptic, was recently shopping in the cereal aisle at a Whole Foods in New York. He buys alternative cereals ‘because we believe the hype to a certain extent about whole grains.’

Chewie is stumped

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This cracks me up in a sad way. First, a really cheesy Photoshop job with the fake arm and the tilted head. Second, it’s totally out of character, turning Chewbacca into Scooby-Doo! Of course there is humor in the Star Wars characters, but this misses the point. It’s off-message, but selling freakin’ breakfast cereal is clearly enough to give them license (literally) to do whatever they want.

Of course, they already had the Darth Tater Mr. Potato Head and the M&M so maybe this is no worse. Just sad to look at during breakfast every day.

Strange package sizes

There’s obviously some packaging scam going on here that I can’t quite sort out. Breakfast cereal seems to come in two sizes, say 16 oz and 21 oz. Visually, the two are almost equivalent, perhaps the larger size will be less than an inch taller and not visisbly wider when looking at the retail shelf. The price for the larger size can be very small; yesterday I saw a 20c increase for the larger size. Why would anyone, therefore, buy the smaller size?

If you ignore promotions (half price, 2 for 1) on either size, what is the purpose of the two sizes in the line? Is it a tactic to gain more shelf space by offering more product choices? That’s my best guess, but that just seems to ridiculous, I don’t want to believe it’s true. Any insights, please leave a comment!

Portion Control to Major Tum

100cal
Nabisco 100 Calorie Packs are a brilliantly simple packaging and branding innovation. Give people more control over what they eat by packaging a fixed calorie amount.
100 calories seems like a harmless enough amount to snack on and it’s an easy number to help tally your daily intake. Portion control is a complex aspect of dieting, with endless confusion about what is a portion? What is a serving?
The 100 Calorie brand takes precedence over the ingredient brand (although some of those such as Oreo Thin Crisp are special-to-this-product-line extensions, with presumably lower-cal reformulations).

No Sugar Tonight – No Difference

Snipped from original story

Experts who reviewed the lower-sugar versions of six major brands of sweetened cereals at the request of The Associated Press found they have no significant nutritional advantages over their full-sugar counterparts.

Nutrition scientists at five universities found that while the new cereals do have less sugar, the calories, carbohydrates, fat, fiber and other nutrients are almost identical to the full-sugar cereals. That’s because the cereal makers have replaced sugar with refined carbohydrates to preserve the crunch.

Officials at General Mills, Kellogg’s and Post were unable to explain why the new cereals are a better choice, but noted they give consumers more options about how much sugar they eat.

Company officials said they were responding to parents’ demands for products with less sugar and that they aren’t claiming these cereals are any healthier than the originals.

That may not be obvious to consumers.

On some boxes, the lower-sugar claim is printed nearly as large as the product’s name, and only by carefully comparing the nutrition labels of both versions of a cereal would a shopper know there is little difference between them.

“You’re supposed to think it’s healthy,” said Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University and author of a book critical of the food industry’s influence on public health. “This is about marketing. It is about nothing else. It is not about kids’ health.”

Only one cereal, General Mills’ Cinnamon Toast Crunch, saw a true calorie reduction, dropping from 130 calories to 120 per three-fourths cup serving.

The reduced-sugar versions of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops; General Mills’ Cocoa Puffs and Trix; and Post’s Fruity Pebbles all have the same number of calories per serving.

Blame the calorie woes on crunch. To preserve cereals’ taste and texture, sugar is replaced with other carbs that have the same calories as sugar and are no better for you.

Series

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