Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Man, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. Jerry's here too, talking about her grandmother and what she did with pop tarts and that actually sounds kind of good.
Oh man, my grandmother wouldn't have there wouldn't have been a pop tart anywhere near her house.
Oh no, she was like that. Huh.
Well one of them, my one more, I mean one was sort of the modern grandmother. My mom's mom. They had like TV and stuff like that and a BCR. But Granny Bryant, my dad's mother, was very old school, sort of rural Tennessee, and like, she didn't have a television, she didn't have anything like a.
Pop tart, right, She's like, if I didn't can it, you're not gonna eat it.
Yeah. She's just kind of had the big, big jar of grease on the stove that like, she never bought oil in her life. She just kept re using the same stuff.
Man, I'll bet that tasted good though.
Yeah, Granny Bryant the best.
Well, that's funny you said that one of your other grandmother, your mom's mom, was modern. Yeah, because that's actually Some theories say that that is what pop tarts grew out of, that there was this huge shift in the sixties, usually pointed to a second wave feminism where women began to essentially say, like, this whole traditional housewife thing is basically domestic servitude, and I'm not down for it anymore. I'm
going to work in the workplace. And so convenience food grew up almost immediately to kind of fill that void or whatever, the vacuum that was left as moms started to move out of the house into the workplace and people still needed to eat, that's right.
And I feel like this is one where we assume everyone knows what a pop tart is, oh yeah, and we get punished for that in emails. So a pop tart is a maybe a breakfast eye. But as we'll see in the old ads, it was you could be for lunch or a snack or whatever. But it is a toaster pastry. It's a little sort of fruit filled faux pastry that you stick in your toaster or not
and toasted up or not. And it came about and we're gonna, you know, we need to think Livia, but we definitely want to thank Diana Stampfler for the website Promote Michigan because, as Livia found, as I found, when it comes to pop Tart origin stories, Diana Stampler's is the bomb Diggity.
She did her homework.
Yeah, she had a lot of great detail that other places didn't have, so big thanks to that website. But pop Tarts came out of the nineteen sixties. And we're going to have to retell a little bit of our live episode about the Kellogg Serial Corporation and the Kellogg brothers because that's where this story starts. We'll give you kind of a quick little overview, right.
Yeah, that was our live episode from Sydney. It was good.
Yeah.
So the Kellogg brothers, William Keith or will Keith and John Harvey Kellogg, they ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium, which essentially was a health spa health resort dedicated to getting you to poop with precise perfectness.
Right, yeah, and other things.
And this was in the nineteenth century, and so as a result of this, one of the things that came out of it was the Kellogg brothers inventing new types of food. And one of the foods that they invented were corn flakes, And almost as importantly as them inventing corn flakes was the one of their guests, one of their patients coming along, and his name was C. W. Post.
That's right. He loved those corn flakes and spend a little time there and said, you know what, I'm gonna start making my own cereal. I remember a lot of that. I guess when you do the live show several times. I remember a lot of details from that one, by the way, but like individual jokes.
Even oh well, lay it on me, buddy, I'll just.
Made think of the Elton John album title was that, But I can't remember the name of the machine, the electric bath something. It sounded like an Elton John.
Electric light bath.
Electric light bath was, yes, I remember that.
It was like one of those one person steam rooms where your head stuck out, but it was exactly yeah.
So that's what was going on at Battle Creek. But Cwpost tries that Kellogg Cornflake says, I love this stuff. I'm going to form a company to make it. And the Post company was formed in eighteen ninety five, and it was about ten or eleven years after that that Kellogg got into the cereal business. Like legit wise and established their Battle Creek Toasted corn Flake company.
Yeah, so they're like, we're going to sell these things outside of the sanitarium. And now Post and Kellogg's were direct competitors. Yeah, and this new emerging cereal market that those two companies created out of thin air. By the time the SI roll around a good half a century later,
breakfast cereal was a thing. It had been healthy, healthy, healthy, and then I think starting in nineteen forty eight, sugar Crisp was the first sugar cereal that came out, and it was like, oh, they went full board right out of the gate.
Yeah, I mean with sugar crisps.
So I think they call it golden crisp now because you like, a mob with torches and pitchforks would come after you if you called your cereal sugar crisp. But it's the same thing. And that came out in the forties. So by the time the sixties were around, you had a lot of different sugary cereals, and Kellogg's and Posts were making a lot of them. But the upshot of the cereal market being established is there's not a lot
of new things you can do. You can come up with a new cereal and it'll be kind of a hit or not, and that's about all you can do. So they started looking for entirely new products to kind of feel like, I said, this vacuum that was being left by second wave feminism getting women out of the house and into the workplace, so that they were like, we need to come up with convenience foods that are even more convenient than cereal.
Yeah, then pouring something out of a box and adding milk.
And then reading the back of the box.
Or water in the case of was that Fridays, You.
Better put some water in that. Damn. I love that one.
Classic. So this was also a time a post war sort of food science boom was happening where they were making all this sort of dehydrated space age astronaut food and stuff like that, and so that had a lot to do with it as well. And post was experimenting with that stuff and experimenting with wrapping things in foil dehydrating or partially dehydrating stuff, and they said, all right,
we're making these gains burgers. This dog crumbly, you know, looks like a meat burger for your dog that's wrapped in foil that you break apart.
Do you remember those?
Oh yeah, yeah, they're still around, right or did they go away?
They ran away in the nineties I read.
I definitely remember Gainsburger's because I always remember thinking like, those are the luckiest stocks in the world, do.
You Yeah, it was.
Like my family would never buy that stuff.
No. Same here. That was like luxury dog food at the time, but now it'd be like I wouldn't even feed this toough no. Oh right.
Yeah. So they're experimenting with like foil wrap things, and as you'll see, that's what pop tarts were wrapped in. So that's why that's kind of key. And they said, all right, we've invented a pastry filled with fruit, like a fruit mixture, and we figured out how to make it shelf stable so it doesn't need to go in the fridge, and how to have it not collect bacteria over time. Yeah, and toasters on the counter were a thing now instead of just having to use the oven
for everything. And so they shape them into a toaster sized thing, wrapped it in foil. And in October nineteen sixty three, the Battle Creek in Choirer newspaper reported that these country squares, which is what they're calling them is the latest and greatest food that you're gonna want on your breakfast table.
Yeah, and it took me a little while, but I wondered if country squares was a play on country squire.
What's country squire?
It was a landowner, a rural landowner in medieval England.
Hmmm, I doubt it, but you never know.
Okay, they call them country squares. Let's just leave it at that. Okay, Josh, Fine, but this was Post. This wasn't Kellogg's who ended up making the pop tart. This was Post who was breaking new ground with these little handheld toaster heated pastries.
Right, that's right.
Problem was the I don't know if the Battle Creek Quirer got in there and had a spy or else, if there was a really dumb vice president that was getting exposure in the Battle Creek Chuirer. But Post was not ready to go to market with these things. They had a recipe, but they didn't know how they were going to package it, market it, get it out to stores. So they had many months of development left ahead of
them when news broke. Well, it just so happens that the higher ups at companies like Kellogg read the Battle Creek Inquirer because they're in the same town. And this gave them the ability to catch up because they were caught totally off guard by this. Yeah, but it gave them the ability to catch up, scramble and create their own versions. And I believe pop Tarts ended up beating Country Squares to market.
Yeah. I think the vice president of kellogg says, what is this Country Squares And someone said it's a rural landowner in England. No. There was a vice president though, named William Lamoth, and he had a guy working there in the kitchen named Doc Joe Thompson, and he said, get to work. We need our own pastry. And it would be their first foray into any kind of little bakery product like that. And they wanted a partner because they, you know, again, they were just serial people.
So he likes to have a partner.
Yeah, exactly. So they went to the Heckman Biscuit Company, which was conveniently also in Michigan. They had been around selling Dutch cookies since the beginning of the late nineteenth century, door to door, and by the nineteen sixties when this is happening, their division of the United Biscuit Company of America,
which would eventually become Keebler in sixty six. Right there in Grand Rapids, they had a great modern industrial bakery and it was a really sort of a great partnership out of the gate Grand Rapids.
By the way, just a little personal aside is where I learned that I actually love frog legs.
Oh really.
Yeah. There was this dinner theater in Grand Rapids that my family used to go to when I was growing up in Toledo, and.
The frog leg Theater.
On their buffet, they had frog legs, and I would I tried them once and I was like, oh my god, these are amazing. I don't think I would eat one now. But when I was like eight, nine, ten, I would eat some frog legs.
I don't know where it was, buddy, but I tried frog legs on a buffet in the nineteen seventies or early eighties. Yeah, and I thought, Hey, this tastes like chicken kind of.
It's the weird skin that really throws it off.
Though these were fried, so I don't remember the skin, and this is a very distant memory. So but I'm with you. I couldn't eat a frog now.
These were not fried. These were like braised.
Mine were fried.
So back to thanks for indulging me. Sure, So back to the Heckman Biscuit Company. At the time, they were making stuff like macaroons, butter cookies, vanilla wafers, windmills, ginger snaps, all your favorite like old timey cookies. This company was making and to make all this stuff they had just a really knockout dynamite production facility, so it was a
good idea to go to them. Apparently the Heckman Company wasn't fully on board with this, but there was a guy named William Post, no relation to the Post Cereal company, who was in this, did work for Heckman at their Grand Rapids and he's like, I'll do this, I'll take this project on.
Yeah, And it wasn't an official thing. I think it was a handshake agreement at first. They started, you know, testing out versions, giving them to their kids to try, of course, which is sort of the usual story when food science is involved. In Dan, I think the son of William Post again supposedly no relation. Quite a coincidence, though, don't you think.
It is quite a yeah, almost suspicious?
Yeah, I agree, But little Dan said they taste like cardboard. And they said, all right, let's go back to the drawing board. And he said, well, these explode when you put them in the toast. Their dad and they said, all right, well, let's put some holes in it, like you know how you score a pie for the same reason that you bacon an oven. They started scoring the dough for the you know, and kind of solve that problem out of the gate.
Well, yeah, that's why there's little holes and pop tarts still today.
That's right, because they will explode. It's true fruit expands, I guess, or fruit like stuff. And they initially set on as Daniel de Lewis would say, fruit scones, the rest of us would say fruit scones. And I think there were four flavors out of the gate, strawberry, blueberry, and apple currant that were partnered with Smuckers, another great idea to provide their fruit filling. And then oh baby, the fourth one, the all time great brown sugar cinnamon.
Yep, that's the best one, hands down.
Oh you too, huh oh, yes, okay, great, what a relief.
Yeah, some lipped in BlackBerry tea and brown sugar cinnamon pop tarts in the evening was just a great way to wind down after a long day in third grade.
So what is that garbage? Jerry said before we recorded.
She talked about her grandmother making that part, making a blueberry I believe, blueberry pop tarts that were un fragtasted and buttering them.
Okay, well, that was going to hang on to that for my final tip, but I might as well launch into it now. That is the secret to pop tarts. Put it in the toaster, toast it up for me, brown sugar, cinnamon. Then you get a stick of butter. I think I've said this on another episode and maybe our Breakfast episode, Okay, and then you just take that stick of butter, don't even like cut off a piece, just unwrap it a little bit, flip it over to the non frosted side and just sort of rub it
on there. And then don't forget about that frosted side, my friend, flip it back over, butter up that frosted side a little and the edges and get those corners. And because the problem with pop tarts to me is always a little too dry where there's no filling, and this solves a problem. It's buttery, it's delicious, I highly recommend it.
Okay, if you mentioned that before, then there's a one hundred percent chance that I followed up with this that I have. I heard of that from Jessica Simpson. Oh who mentioned it. I guess when she was pregnant. She was craving buttered pop tarts and I hadn't heard of it until then.
It's the finishing touch, it's the cherry on top. It really, it really finishes it off nicely.
So you do that with the brown sugar cinnamon version.
Dude, every version, but that's the only version I'll eat, And I gotta say I don't. I don't eat pop tarts anymore, like I can't remember the last pop tart I had, But I can't walk down that aisle without looking at them and going, oh, man, if you fall into my basket, maybe you'll make it out of the store, right.
I So I love brown sugar cinnamon. Since we're talking about personal preferences, but yeah, for the fruit ones. I used to be all strawberry as a kid, and it was just because I never ventured out. And once I grew up a little more and my tastes really started to develop, I found that cherry is actually the top fruit.
Oh did not know.
That until I don't know, maybe ten years ago.
Okay, i'll have to. I mean this is I'm going to buy some pop tarts just to try some of these cherry. All right, I'll try cherry. They're frosted, I take it.
Yes, I mean, I don't even know why they make them unfrosted. That's crazy.
Those are the kind of had to eat growing up here and there. They weren't even called pop tarts. I think they were called toaster pastries and there was no frosting. Insight.
Yeah, and your grandma candem right, but that.
Does the cherry have sprinkles? Because I don't love the sprinkles, but it's just sort of part of the frosting so it doesn't stand out too much.
Cherry has everything you want. Not only does it have sprinkles, chuck, it has like sugar crystals. Oh, yes, dude, you're gonna love cherry. Believe me. I expect a text later on with you thanking all right for recommending cherry pop tarts.
Yeah, Ruvie's never had a pop tart, so we're gonna we're gonna get to start on all right. So, uh, well, I guess we should probably take a break.
We just we kind of got off course here.
Yeah, yeah, okay, we left off at fruit scone and Smuckers and the launching of the original four, and we'll come back and pick it up right after this.
Stop learn and stuff with Joshua job stuff fu shine up.
Okay, chuck. So those original fruit scones, the prototype, the er pop tart, I guess I would call it if you're a weirdo. They were not exactly what you'd recognize as pop tarts today. I think if you put them next to a pop tart, you it wouldn't be like,
you know, night and day. But one of the big different was the fruit scones had a diagonal score going across them, not quite from corner to corner, but a little more in the middle, and you could kind of break them in half like you would have like a grilled cheese sandwich kind of cut like that.
Yeah, and none of these first ons for frostedy there we should point out.
No, it took years, a couple of years, because all of the frostings that they came up with initially essentially either melted or caught fire in the toaster, so they did not have the frosting out of the gate yet. But one thing that pop Tarts still are that was part of the initial rollout was their package together, two per package, and the reason why it was just simply cost cutting, Like if they had individually packaged each pop tart,
it would have cost them a lot more. But it also makes me wonder how many people over the last like sixty something years would have only eaten one pop tart if they were individually wrapped. You open that, you open the package, you got one, what are you gonna do like roll up the other one that you can't The foil is designed, I'm sure to tear open in ways that you can't reseal it, so you have to eat both of them essentially.
Yeah, I was a little disappointed to know as a cost cutting measure because I was just like I thought, someone, you know, mister Posts decreed from on high they shall be eaten two at a time.
Well that's actually the serving size if you read the back of the box, which is nuts because you could if it were just individually wrapped, you could say one pop tart is a serving and people would be used.
Yeah. Yeah, true, those first pop tarts too, they were a little more rounded on the corners, not quite as squared off, unrecognizable, and honestly, they look delicious, even unfrosted. It looks more like and I know this is an ad I sent you and Jerry, like an old ad from the sixties. But and ads are made to make the food look beautiful. But it looks more like a pie than what they have out today, you know.
Yeah, Like the edges are way more like a pie crust.
Yeah, it looks kind of crimped or whatever. Yeah.
So I think after this all happened, like you said, poor Dan Post was taking bite after bite and saying these are disgusting. But within four months of Kellogg's approaching Henkles, they had like a ready for market pop tart developed.
Yeah or bruts gone Yeah, changed the name, I think pretty quickly to pop tarts, which I never knew this. This is a play on pop art, which is a big thing at the time with you know, Andy Warhol in his factory, And I had no idea that it was just sort of a little clever nod to that.
I didn't either, I didn't realize pop tarts were quite so cool. Agreed, So the trademark for the brand was filed on June twentieth, nineteen sixty four. They started shipping out the first cases on September fourteenth, and they chose Cleveland as their test market. Yeah, Cleveland went bonkers for these things. I saw in the first two weeks. They sold ten million boxes of pop tarts.
Oh my god.
By December thirtieth, so just a couple months, like a million boxes, yes, ten million boxes of pop tarts. So they started shipping them in September. By the end of the year, they had to run an ad saying, hey, sorry, we ran out. We didn't think you guys are going to be this into it. We're working literally around the
clock to get more pop tarts out to you. And by the end of the year they were making they had made a billion pop tarts and we're selling them like hot cakes, but more like hotcake flavored pop tarts.
Yeah. And so if you're wondering, like what about Posts who sort of invented this, they weren't first to market. They finally released their Country Squares and they quickly were like, well, that name stinks, so everyone's getting us confused with the Royal Landowners. So they rebranded them to toast them fruit filled pop Ups sold that off in nineteen seventy one to Schultz and Birch Biscuit Company. They still make those.
I think they're still the same name, even toast thems. Yeah, and there have been different you know, sort of like I said, I grew up with a sort of cheap version. I think they were called toaster pastries. Nibisco had one called Toastettes that they finally stopped selling in two thousand and two. Hillsbury. I will say the toaster Strudle when it came out in nineteen eighty five was a pretty big, hot eyedem I remember.
Yeah, because it was an unfrosted pop tart, much more pastry like, flaky pastry than what pop tart is. Yeah, key was the gimmick was that came with frosting separated, so you put frosting on it and I.
Would then also squeeze it into your mouth at the end.
Exactly. Yes, And I was crazy for these things, and I guess I got a bad batch or something once I got sick off of it. And now just seeing those two words together makes my stomach turn. No way, Yes, I would. I couldn't eat a you wouldn't be in the same room as a toaster strudle.
Again, that was like me with a beef turkey for solid ten years, you poor bastard, I know, all right, So they keep developing these things. The very first ones was just the pastry and the filling. They added that frosting in nineteen sixty seven, Like you said, once they came up with one that wouldn't slide off and kill your house. Basically, the first frosted ones were Dutch apple, concord, grape boy that sounds good, raspberry that sounds good, and
of course brown sugar cinnamon. Then they added the sprinkles the year after that, and since then they've just been coming up with kind of new crazy flavors, sometimes obviously special editions, co branding, and just trying new things.
Yeah, So just to kind of put this into perspective, they out of the gate. Remember Post was supposed to be the first to do this. Pop Tarts just destroyed Posts and everybody else so much. But I think that they have something like eighty percent of the market share for that kind of product. In twenty fourteen, the Wall Street Journal reported they had growth in sales, so every year they sold more than they had the year before,
for thirty two straight years. Wow, And that in twenty twenty two they sold three billion pop.
Tarts boxes or individual tarts.
I don't know. If you put it like that, then it's probably individual pop tarts. So I'm going to go back and revise my thing about that first year to one billion pop tarts, which is still impressive.
Yeah. I mean, once you get into those kind of numbers, you're kind of splitting hairs, you know.
Yeah, it's true. Man, Thanks for saying that, because I was feeling pretty down about myself for a second.
No, no, no, no, you're great. So in nineteen sixty eight, one of the little side products they made was called this is Kellogg's called the Danish go Round. They were trying to make it look more like a Danish, like a real Danish, because at like little ladies, garden parties and stuff, it's like, why make a Danish when you
can just buy these. They didn't do so great. They crumbled up a lot, so they replaced them with the Danish Rings in seventy seven and then just got out of the Danish market in the eighties.
Yeah, which is kind of said because Danishes are great.
Yeah, the cheese Danish.
Yes, I think that's probably my favorite too. Yeah. In nineteen seventy one, they're like, Okay, we've got this whole pop tart thing down, Let's see what else we can do with this thing, and they came up with.
Presto Pizza, which is a bad idea.
It was a pizza version of pop tarts, and they put in the same box and everything. The problem was that there was not enough sauce and too much dough. Not anything else is the problem with it. It was just that it was too dowey, and so it went away pretty quick. But it was a good attempt, I guess. Yeah.
When I said it was a bad idea, I think it's actually a great idea. But you just you can't get enough sauce and cheese and whatever in that form to make it. Like like, you know, we make these when we go camping with pie irons. You ever heard of pie iron?
Sure? You have? Yeah, like a hand pie iron, right, yeah?
You like, you know, you take two pieces of bread, you butter up the little iron and then it's hinged and you put like we put pizza sauce and pepperoni and cheese and you squeeze them together and then you bake it over campfire, and that's thick enough to where you can actually have enough stuff. But at pop tart's just not thick enough.
Well. Plus also now today, if you came out with that, everybody'd say, this isn't like a hot pocket. So what's the point?
Yeah, yeah, good point. You know.
I'll but I'll bet it burns your tongue like a hot pocket when if you ate it too soon? Or a Gino's pizza roll? Is there anything that can burn a tongue worse than a Gino's pizza roll because you just you eat them too soon. You can't wait around for them to cool off enough.
Yeah, that's a garbage food that I wasn't allowed to have much and we don't have at our house. But at Ruby's pool party this year, I just needed something easy to put in the oven to make for a bunch of kids. Yeah, and I got freaking pizza rolls.
What do you think?
They're not great? But the kids loved them.
Oh, I haven't had one in a while. I'll have to go back and revisit or else maybe I'll just.
Not You have a more sophisticated balant. Now I would just lean on nostalgia and what a great memory you have.
Okay, thank you for that.
I don't think we need to go all through all these other things. I mean, they made pop tart bites, little crisps, and all sorts of little side products that kind of came and went. Like all products do, they try to spin things off and it usually doesn't work out.
No, don't forget pop tart cereal that kind of made a splash for a minute.
I didn't try that. I hadn't heard of that. Did you have that?
What's weird is I remember eating it as a younger person, but apparently it came out in twenty eighteen, So either I made up the idea that I ate it, or I was way older than I remember when I ate it.
It was just like seven years yeah, exactly when you were a child. Right.
So essentially, what pop Starts finally did was it's like what we did, Like, we tried a TV show, we tried serious XM, we tried going on other people's shows and everyone's like, we just want to hear you podcast. That's essentially what pop Tarts did. They finally just put it all in to mostly just making pop tarts and new interesting flavors.
Yeah, well it helped that no one called us after a while, right when the opportunities tried up.
You know, I took it as you know, we just want to hear you podcast.
Now I'm with you marketing wise, you know, we did an episode recently on Saturday Morning Cartoons and a lot of it to some listeners disappointment, as it turns out, was about marketing to children like sugar cereals and things
like that during Saturday Morning cartoons and pop tarts. Was I mean, definitely one of the I was about to say worst offenders or but maybe I should just say one of the best at it, because eight ran tons and tons of commercials saying like put them in the lunch box, eat them for breakfast, have them as a snack, Like really, you can serve him warm, you can have them in between meals. You can eat him right out of the foil.
Yeah, we'll get to that in a second.
What right up? Right out of the foil?
Yeah, you do you do that?
I have only done that in a pinch. I used to throw these in the backpack for camping trips when I was young, before they had a ton of like granola bars and stuff. Sure, like now there's so much of that, But back then, I'll just throw some pop Tarts in the backpack and I would eat him out of the package. But it's not great.
It can be done, but no, it's not great.
Which what I do then is is I tear off the edges, so I just have the frosted center.
Oh yeah, and you leave the edges to nature. That's right, So the wolf's drunking you, Yeah, exactly. They did come up with a mascot for a very short time, which is weird because this is exactly the kind of brand that would have a mascot, right, Yeah, But they ditched Milton the Toaster pretty quickly when they debuted him in nineteen seventy one, but they continued on, like you said, advertise, like any time you watched Saturday morning cartoons, they were
on after school cartoons, they were on. Like if you were a kid watching TV, you probably saw a pop Tart commercial.
Yeah. I looked up Milton the Toaster and I remember Milton the Toaster. So I don't know if it was reruns or what, but I remember seeing Milton firmly in my brain. I think these days. They adopted a slogan called crazy Good Yeah, and they've been running since sort of like two thousand and four, all kinds of ads under the crazy Good banner, and I think they ran run from two thousand and four to two thousand and eight.
That supposedly increased pop tart eating in ten to twelve year olds by twenty eight percent in two thousand and five, which is a pretty big uptick for kids in pop tart sure.
Speaking of their ads though, I don't remember Milton at all, but I do remember this one that I cannot find on the internet, but it goes pop pop pop pop, my feet can't stop pop pop pop pop, Kellogg's pop Tarts.
I don't remember that one.
There was also well I made that up too when I was eating pop tarts Cereal in twenty eighteen. There was also a campaign called so Hot They're Cool and another one called Snakula, So if you're a millennial or gen xer like that pretty much covers you. And then it seems like gen Z was getting the Crazy Good campaign, which is so okay, but it's like these crudely drawn pop tarts and they like kill each other to eat one. Another kind of thing. It's just weird and bizarre and off the wall interesting.
Well, they took over the Citrus Bowl, the college football game played in Orlando a couple of years ago. It's now the pop Tarts Bowl, and I think it'll.
Be in its third year on the next one.
And they have, you know, these interesting tie ins where they have three different mascots and the MVP of the game picks the mascot, so you know, they're tying and stuff like that. They say it's kind of fun. I think they they like to tout they're just sort of out of the box thinking as far as marketing goes. And we should also say they spun that pop Tarts off from kew Loog into its own company. A lot
of times food brands will do that. So pop Tarts, along with a few other things, was spun out into a company that sounds straight out of the movie Gatica. It's called kell Nova.
It is kind of unsettling for some reason. But that pop Tart's bowl, the MVP doesn't just pick the maskcot, he picks the mascot to kill and eat, and they have like a giant pop Tart that's I think seventy three times the size of a regular pop tart, and for a little while they sold it for sixty dollars. They called it the party pastry, just a gent.
It's a really good price.
I thought so too. It seems like a real value.
I mean, I saw this a picture of this thing on a kitchen table, and that's cheaper than a decent birthday cake.
Yeah. I mean, let's say you have eight pack of pop tarts.
Well, they're sold in sixes though, right, I think they're.
Sold six, eight, fourteen, a million. There's like a bunch of different ones, twenty four, I'm pretty sure. But I will tell you seventy three times the size of a regular pop tart does not translate to sixty dollars. No, So it is a really great value. You can't find it anymore though, unfortunately. Sorry. If you're a thrifty type and you buy one big party pastry and cut them into individual pop tart size shapes and then pack them away in the freezer, you can't do that anymore.
Oh, I bet that centerpiece is so good.
Yeah, I'll bet it is too.
Have we taken a second break?
I don't think so, man, I think we should now, all.
Right, we'll take a second break and talk about everybody's favorite topic, helping safety. Right after this.
Stop learn and stuff with Joshua job stuff.
You shine up, all right. So we kind of made a joke earlier about the frosting sliding off and burning your kitchen down. I didn't find where it had ever burnt a house down. But over the decades, there have been a lot of reports about pop tart fires. In nineteen ninety three, it came a little more to the forefront of pop culture when syndicated humor columnists Dave Barry wrote about a report from Dover, Ohio, where there was a pop tart fire and the toaster, and you know,
it was legit. I think they found the fire department did test and they found that if you just lead that thing in there, your toaster can shoot flames three feet high. And supposedly Dave Barry recreated this outdoors as part of his humor column.
I saw a website called Flamingtoasters dot com. They did this experiment too. They put two in a toaster, and you need a malfunctioning toaster that never pops up right so that they continue to heat up because They're designed to make it through like a good long toaster cycle without catching fire. But if the toaster cycle never ends, the pop starts in big trouble. They got eighteen inch high flames in four minutes forty two seconds of toasting.
But roundly round the internet, I've seen these flames. These aren't you like campfire flames. I've seen them described as like blow torch like. So there's like flinterstoring out of your toaster. And apparently the reason why is because of all of the high fruit toast corn syrup inside the filling, it heats up too much, kaboom, and it catches fire.
Yeah, and I think those I mean, it's unique. It's not like toast will do that because that filling a with the high fruit toast corn syrup, but b that filling packed in that pastry just retains a lot of heat and it just, yeah, it's a pretty volatile can be a pretty volatile situation, I think. The Philly Inquirer in two thousand and one reported that the US Customer Product Safety Commission had seventeen reports of pop tart fires and eventually, of course, it would be a lawsuit. In
nineteen ninety five, pop Tarts settled. The planet's attorney apparently threatened I don't know if it was Ingest or not to call in Dave Berry to go to trial, and pop Tart said, we'll give you two grand and they said twenty five hundred, and Poptart said twenty four hundred, and they said deal, deal, twenty four hundred.
Bucks, right, I guess, and then the turning took like two thousand of that.
Yeah. Probably.
So one of the things that pop Tarts also gets, I guess bounced around for is because they're just not healthy in any way, shape or form. So unhealthy that there was another it wasn't a lawsuit, but they got pressure from this children's advertising review unit to remove the phrase made with real fruit from its packaging because the amount of fruit in it is so paltry that they don't even have the right to say that on their
box anymore. And the reason why is because so serving sizes too of say frosted strawberry pop Tarts three hundred and seventy calories, thirty one grams of sugar, eight grams of fat. But here's the healthy part, one gram of fiber and four grams of protein, which can only be explained as accidental.
Yeah, byproduct. I wonder if on the nutritional thing it also accounts for added butter.
Right, with butter a million calories?
Yeah, you mentioned the fruit content. I think in twenty twenty one there were four plaintiffs at file the five million dollar class action suit that said, hey, this is false advertising. You got pictures of strawberries on this thing on the box, and you mentioned there wasn't much actual
fruit in there. There was a quantification of that. The whole grain frosted strawberry pop tart contains less than two percent each of dried pear, apple, and strawberry, and the strawberry pop tart is the strawberry is the third of those fruits, which you know they're listened in order how much they have. So there's more pear and apple in a strawberry pop tart than strawberry.
Right, So they're not healthy now, which so you can imagine my surprise when I was looking for articles about the health or the health impact or how unhealthy pop tarts are that I found an article titled can pop tarts really help with weight loss? I was like, are you kidding me? And if you read the article six paragraphs in they're like, no, absolutely not, I can't help
with weight loss at all. But it kind of underscores this trend that I've noticed just in the last couple of months, chuck of just a slew of long tail, which means like really really specific articles clearly written by AI, and they're all the same. They'll be like a short introduction, then there'll be the table of contents, and then they'll go section, section, section, and all sections are like basically one paragraph. They're totally convoluted. The sections will repeat themselves,
they're often giving contradictory information. It's just crap. And it's essentially the dead Internet theory finally come to pass, where it's just AI writing articles for other AI to be trained on, and we humans have just been pushed to the side and given articles with the clickbaity titles. Can pop tarts really help with weight loss?
Dimly? But a book by accident off Amazon? There was a pottery book and she got it and she was like, wait a minute, He's like this isn't a real person, and she tried to look up the author didn't exist.
Wow.
Yeah. Obviously returned it and was not too happy.
But A I was like man, I thought that was a sale.
I do want to circle back though, to that lawsuit, the class action lawsuit. The judge, eventually, a federal judge dismissed it and said no reasonable consumer would see the entire product label reading the words frosted strawberry pop darts next to a picture of a toaster pastry coated in frosting, and reasonably expect that fresh strawberries would be the sole ingredient in the product. In other words, everyone knows what
a pop tarted dummy go home exactly. You don't need it because it's healthy.
I had forgotten that you hadn't wrapped that story ups.
That's right, quite a.
Boon diatle in the middle there.
So because of the you know, food dyes and things like that, you're not going to get like a regular American pop tart in other countries. A lot of countries in Europe don't even have pop tarts at all, but they do have different versions that are a little better probably, And I know the UK doesn't have high fruitose corn syrup in their frosted strawberry sensation pop tart or red forty, yellow six and blue one dyes. They instead use paprika, beat root and extract from the annato tree to color.
They're pop darts, yeah, which is an orange ready color I've read.
Yeah, I wonder how that affects the flavor paprika.
But it's also I mean, like when you hear about this, like the EU or the UK having these standards that are just that makes American standard substandard as far as health goes. It's just so frustrating that nobody's looking out for American consumers like they do in the EU and UK. You know, yeah, like use beat root, jerk.
Agree. Should we go through a couple of these cultural touchstones. Yeah, I'll mention the movie, the Netflix movie You're Unfrosted, which was at least directed and starred. I don't know if Jerry Seinfeld helped write it.
Yes he did, and conceive it too.
Yeah, it was It was a bad so bad it was a bad movie.
It was so boring.
I didn't watch it. I watched a little bit of it and realized that it was flaming garbage.
Exactly the same for me. I think I made it ten minutes in.
Yeah, it's really bad. It got a couple of razzies. Amy Schumer was in it, like really quality people. It's just it was just a bad movie.
Sometimes it happens, yeah, and it did happen with that one.
What else?
You can make your own pop tarts at home. I've actually done this. I made an apple cinnamon giant pop tart. M it turned out okay. I think the trick is the crust always seems too high falutin, so you're not really recreating the pop tart very well.
No, yeah, but that's kind of the like I had one in a fancy restaurant once. They had it on the dessert. They called it their pop tart, and it was It was astounding, but it wasn't.
A pop exactly. It has to have a certain.
Yeah, trashy quality exactly.
It does, and it's missing that when you make it at home.
In twenty twenty one, when we were bombing Afghanistan, we started dropping food, including pop tarts that the military, the US military said was supposed to be an icebreaker for those people, for the Afcan people, And then they also got criticized because they're like, hey, we're dropping food for these people to subsist on. Let's not drop garbage food as an icebreaker.
Right, They're like, can't pop tarts really help with weight loss? They've also made several appearances on the Simpsons, most famously when Homer's trying to gain weight so he can get on disability and not have to work. I remember that he has he consults with doctor Nick, who tells him how to gain weight. In One of the things he says is instead of using bread, make a sandwich with two pop tarts.
I bet that's so good, like a PV and J between two pop darts.
Oh yeah, I could say that. Well, there's PB and J pop tarts, or there used to be, and those were pretty good.
Yeah. I mean they've had lots of wacky flavors. I know, you looked up a bunch of those. Any of them stand out?
Oh god, I don't have it in front of me. There there were a few that the ones that stand out to me, I wouldn't like, Like they have a whole ice cream shop like sub brand where it's like chocolate vanilla milkshake or something like that. Oh, it doesn't sound very good. No, there's like a co branded orange crush one the NW Roopier. There are a couple that I've tried that sounded good. I didn't really like like sugar cookie, which is a seasonal one in the winter, it wasn't as good as you'd think.
What was the filling.
It was like a chemically sugar cookie pasty dough.
Okay, it just.
Should have been better than it was. But there's a gingerbread one I haven't tried, and I would like to try that one. But I think ultimately for me, you just go back to like some of the originals, they're just time tested and they're so so good, like cherry or blueberry or strawberry or of course brown sugar cinnamon.
Agreed, it just hit me they should partner up with bisc cough because they make that biscof butter. I bet that would be pretty good.
I'm really surprised they haven't.
And a couple of these we have some stats at the end, and a couple of these stood out to me. I think that was a twenty twenty four household panel survey. The ones that stand out to me are the reasons for people buying pop tarts here these days. Fifty six percent said convenience and thirty percent said it brings back childhood.
Memories ostensibly good memories, yeah.
Of course, and then the other one that stood out was seventy two percent of pop start buyers said they ate them themselves, and these were adults, and fifty four percent said other adults in the house would eat them, and only twenty five percent said they were for their kids. So it seems like gen x is buying and eating these pop tarts.
Yeah, the mails they're keeping them for themselves.
Yeah.
One that stood out to me is forty four percent of American surveyed said they eat them at least once a week, and nine percent eat them every day.
That's a lot.
That is a lot.
Uh.
The other thing that was really surprising is twelve percent of people put them in the refrigerator or freezer and then eat them cold. I've never even heard that. That sounds like madness. And then, uh, one of the other things, Chuck, did you see the thing about the mystery pop tart?
No, so they came up, mister t close.
Replace the tea with the knee, get rid of all the gold in the mohawk, replace them with a pop tart that has a mustache and and sunglasses and a hat like a mystery person, and you've got the misterye pop tarts. It was a campaign they ran in twenty twenty one, and it was like the full shab, Like there's a QR code and you can go online and guess what the mystery flavor was. It was roundly hated it like found disgusting. Someone guessed it was cheese it's
someone guessed it was a Swiss cheese pop tart. Someone guess garlic and onion. It turned out it was an everything Bagel pop tart, and everyone said, we hate that, get it off of our shelves.
Ah. I do love Everything Bagel, almost everything, but I could see where that might not because I even liked that Jenny's Everything Bagel ice cream I thought was so good.
Oh I didn't try that.
A lot of people hated it. I loved it.
To me, I'd be like, no, I'm not gonna waste my time with anything but gooey butter cake or the almond crisp one.
Oh as far as the Genny's goes, Yeah so good. Yeah, agreed, Uh, you got anything else? No? I think I gained a few pounds just doing this episode.
Yeah. I can't decide if I'm going to run out and buy some.
More or just you know, leave it be I'm gonna buy some Well, let me know.
I'll live vicariously through you. Okay, you know what I'll do.
But I'll get I'll have to get the Tinman brown sugar just because I can't not. And I'll only get one other box and I'll get that frosted cherry. Great, I'll let you know.
Okay, Well, while you're doing that, Chuck, how about some listener mail action.
Yeah, this is about another MTV follow up about the show their game show Remote Control. Hey, guys, when I was a sophomore in high school in nineteen ninety and we had to do a project in world history about Mesopotamia. So my friends and I made our own remote control game show with quiz questions about the subject. We had a little brother be our videographer and had bowls of cereal following our head as if we missed the question. We had so much fun creating it. We're so proud
of it. All the kids knew what it was, but I think mister Hall was a bit confused, so what was happening? But we got an a whoo who Thanks for the great episode, for the amazingness that you put out into the world. I adore the show and your friendship that is a big fan from Oh h I Oh go buck Eys Michelle.
Nice, Michelle, thank you for that one. That was a sohio story if I've ever heard one.
Agreed.
If you want to be like Michelle and tell us about something sweet from your childhood that we made you think of again, we love that kind of thing. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom with a pop tart, and send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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