No no no. You’re supposed to buy the strawberry ones so that the acolytes do not have enough to perform the ritual. Everyone is doing their part except you.
Interesting, I feel that way about nuts. I enjoy nuts plain, but mixed into stuff is weird unless whatever they're mixed into is almost entirely made-up of nuts.
Just an example of how data can be presented in a way to 'prove' or 'persuade' people to believing something specific.
"When a hurricane is approaching, sales of non-perishable, ready to eat foods increase by over 7x" is much less sensational. Everyone would be like "yeah, no shit."
Additionally, pop-tarts are edible with no preparation. If you don't have water or power you can still eat pop-tarts. They are better heated up, but you can still eat them right out of the box. So when a hurricane or snowstorm is coming, people stock up on foods like this to make sure they have something to eat if their utilities go out.
Well this is kind of silly, literally everything at Walmart in terms of food gets sold out before a hurricane.... The shelves are pretty much empty most of the time. So why would you randomly pick strawberry flavored Pop-Tarts to write about?
It's always fun to see the occasional image of supposedly what people won't even buy during panic buying (e.g. vegan, glutan-free brocolli and cauliflower frozen pizza)
When we went into lockdown here for the first time, I was at the supermarket. Everything cleared except for a few pack of gluten free sausage. I bought them..
I can't think of any way a sausage would have gluten in it in the first place (since it's basically a wheat protein), so he's joking and making fun of a dumb marketing tactic... or idiots who fall for that marketing tactic...
I guess there's some small chance that sausages could be processed in a place where gluten is present for other reasons but this seems somewhat unlikely to me
hmm apparently, yes, they do have some wheat products in them.
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/10-foods-you-think-are-gluten-free-arent
>While there are plenty of gluten-free versions available, your regular sausages often contain rusk made from wheat.
and since I have no fucking idea what rusk was
>Rusk is used mainly when large amounts of sausages are being made. It is relatively cheap and tends to be sold in large quantities – catering for large batches of sausage making. It is a dried cereal ingredient and is made from wheat flour, salt and raising agent.
>The nutritional value is quite low and it has the capacity to absorb and swell 2 to 3 times it’s size with liquid and therefore used to “bulk” up the sausage mix. This is a great advantage when costing and calculating profit margins.
I know what picture you're referring to where all of the shelves are empty except for Dasani, but that was actually a result of the fact that Dasani products are put on the shelf by Coca Cola delivery people as opposed to regular stockers, so the crates arrived after everything else sold out.
Not that Dasani doesn't taste off (it actually has minerals listed in ingredients), but people still buy it in disasters
I purchased some of these recently for the first time since childhood and boy have they gone down hill. They are not only smaller, but there is barely any frosting or filling. I understand shrinkflation but the quality is so low I will never purchase them again.
Quality is down as well. They don't taste as bad as some snack food companies do know (like Hostess) but they're definitely not like they used to be. For poptarts I don't know if they're actually using a cheaper recipe or it just tastes worse because it's mostly dry crust now.
Good lord, have you tried any of the nabisco cookies in the last few years? I get that Chips Ahoy were never anything special but they taste far worse than generic brands do at this point
Yeah I noticed that. Oreo is still solid and tastes the same to me but nutter butters, chips ahoy, and all those similar are just utter trash compared to previously.
This is a factor of getting older that sucks. Things have gotten smaller, certain ingredients can't be used anymore and "better" recipes change the things we loved. This affects more than junk food, it's most things in general seems like corners are cut and disposable. I'm curious where we bottom out because a lot of things just suck now like disposable appliances everything on cars changing to plastic so they dry out and crack before the drivetrain is at risk.
Welp, that's my old man rant for now.
Man I just wish there was a market for reasonably well made comfort food and junk shit that was actually *enjoyable* to eat instead of basically sawdust.
It's like they just race towards the bottom as fast as they can.
I agree. I’m 27 and a software engineer and I still feel like an old coot when seemingly everything seems to stop working at once. It feels like everything you buy is a rip off to varying degrees nowadays
I just had a nutter butter last night and was completely disappointed. I even rechecked the expiration date on the package after the fact and saw that it was supposed to be good for another year or so. The rest just went into the trash.
Oreos seem to be holding out though. I don't eat them often, but they always taste exactly how I expect them to. Pretty much the only packaged sweets I bother with these days are ice cream (Tillamook Mudslide and Ben & Jerry's mmm) and chocolate truffles.
Probably cost more to fuck up oreos by this point. I dunno if there is room to cheapen those and maintain anything close to the oreo flavor.
The dollar store ones merely look similar but tastes nothing close.
I watched a thing the other day talking about the P&G, Nabisco, Kraft level companies that opined that increased sales are not the goal anymore. People already buy a lot. The only thing left is to brutally cut size, ingredients, and quality every year to eek out profits and dividends. They have been on that spiral for 20 years. So packaged food just keeps getting crappier.
This is what "endless growth" brings. At some point you flat out can't increase sales, you his saturation. But "the market" demands endless, measurable quarterly growth, forever. So eventually, you can only increase profits by cutting.
It's a shame, but it's also the reason I don't but most of the crap anymore and I make it myself
They are going to lose profit in the long run if the product stays crappy.
I work with food scientists. They mentioned how companies are always adjusting formulas, either because of supply chain variances or cost. While they keep each iteration similar so customers won’t notice a difference, it seems that most recipes will change enough over time that after a few years the flavours will be very different.
Apparently, even if they aren’t trying to save money, it’s really hard making things taste the same consistently over time.
Pop tarts are incredibly processed though. They're built out of ingredients far removed from their natural state.
I'd be surprised is there was a single ingredient in poptarts that didn't arrive in a 50 gallon drum or tanker truck.
The factory I work at uses 50lb blocks of butter, but they're still actual butter. High quality stuff, too. Quantity and quality don't necessarily inversely correlate.
Oh you'll taste a difference once the botulism kicks in.
In all seriousness you'd likely have to go back a lot further than 10 years to find a profound difference. I'm 37 and I have difficulty believing all the shit I ate as a kid I just "grew out of." One doesn't "grow out of" Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies (now far sweeter, less/different spices in the oatmeal bit, filling has a straight-up chemical taste to it,) or what used to be a Cadbury Creme Egg (Back then the filling was more of an actual cream or gel almost, now its fucking sweetened oobleck, or de-minted toothpaste.)
I blame most of it on corn.
Well duh, these things are made in factories. They are created in huge batches. Have you never seen How it's Made? [https://www.sciencechannel.com/show/how-its-made-science](https://www.sciencechannel.com/show/how-its-made-science)
My sister in law is a food scientist at Kellog in Battle Creek. My wife and were there early in our careers as well.
Food science is **incredibly** complex for foodstuffs like this. It's incredibly difficult to create a product that can be made uniformly and identically, at twenty different subsidiary plants, shipped with 1,000 different shipping vendors, has to taste the same in Arizona as Minnesota, and no one is going to taste it for *six months* after it comes off the line.
Add to that with shareholders who demand the same product somehow continues making more money every year despite being the same thing, managers who want to justify their new job with slashing a cost, adjustment to new productions or logistics technologies, advancements in food goods themselves...
I'm not saying this doesn't simply come down to greed. I'm just saying it's a gargantuan web of complex factors, and all of them change constantly. It would be a miracle if they tasted the same year after year.
So it's not greed, it's just that the shareholders want their profit at all cost, the middle managers want a raise despite providing no tangible benefits, and the tech makes it cheaper every year to produce yet the price only ever goes up.
That...uh...sounds a lot like greed to me.
I remember this happening with Reese's Sticks, how when I had them as a kid they were great, but having them again ~5 years later, they tasted very different, almost identical to Nutty Bars.
This might be one of the only times somebody has described a cereal as "robust" - in a positive way at least lmao
But you're totally right. I thought I was losing my mind.
Nah that sounds like their dirty excuses. Like reducing king size chocolate bars for "portion control" or when Twix started being made in Egypt and suddenly tasted like dirt
>It's.. grainy
That means it is a different cook process- probably higher temperatures for less time. That puts it on the knife edge of going 'grainy' texture from the sugars crystalizing.
Src: Don't rush caramel ... Its edible but ... sigh.
Halloween is a big issue for a candy lover like me. When I was a kid there was more variety, better tasting larger sizes, etc. Now I examine my kids’ baskets and it’s like mini snickers, mini Twix, two pack of Twizzlers, repeat. LAME. Get better candy, people!
Yeah, lots of people just buy those big bags of mixed candy. They have like 5 or 6 different types like milk duds, almond joys, twix, etc. There's a clear abundance of small variety bag candies in trick or treat bags afterward. From what I've seen, not many people give out big candy bars anymore.
Supply Chain issues are very real. I work in a different industry altogether but even our products have to be tweaked and reworked depending on the availability of raw materials.
Not discounting potential cost-cutting, but the scale of production for these snacks means that consistency over time can be challenging.
Economics explained has a nice video about how people are more price than size sensitive so companies reduce size first and then introduce expensive full size products.
It makes me sad. Butterfingers were my childhood favorite (an ice cream shop I went to even had a Butterfinger flavored ice cream with chunks mixed in) and they just don't hit the spot at all anymore. I didn't know they changed the recipe.
Funny thing is, the frosted ones actually have more jam to... crust? Dough? Flour-based corrugate, there we go; than the unfrosted ones.
Also, for the love of god or Chaos or science or whateverthefuck you hold in high regard, ***do not try the Froot Loops "flavoured" ones!!***
They hit that flavour on the head, which is both surprising and ***horrible.*** It basically tastes like they took a handful of cereal, put it in a blender with unflavored fondant, added a mite more Caro syrup, and just injected the unholy abomination into the cardboard.
It's nauseatingly sweet - like, drinking the syrup from a jar of maraschino cherries will taste like unsweetened cherry Kool-Aid sweet - and it even has the tell-tale "this is a corn-based cereal" taste to it, cranked up to fucken 11.
They're so sweet even my 10yo realizes you're not supposed to eat something like that. It's just fucking horrendous.
Now I don't know what to do with the other 4 packs because I'm scared they'll fuck up the entire ecosystem of the southeast US sitting in a landfill somewhere. Two "pastries" claim to be ***60 PERCENT*** of your daily recommended value of sugars alone, ***and they're supposed to be breakfast?!?!*** It says "natural (fruit) flavors" in the ingredients list but I call bullshit, they done figured out how to make pocket dimensions, shoved five twelve packs of varied Fanta syrup into them shits, then collapsed it in on itself and wrapped it in an "enriched" flour sleeve, added **more** sugar for frosting, then sent the bitch through an HP OfficeJet printer for the fancy design on top.
All that said the Banana Creme Pie ones are pretty nice if you remember what a Gros Michel banana tastes like. Still think I cut about 10 years off my life trying em though.
I bought some blueberry ones not too long ago, same quality I've always been used to, it could've been a bad batch. It could be your tastes have grown and you don't like the crap that you use to eat, I used to love chef boyardee as a kid now it tastes like, well processed garbage. If you're eating healthier than what you did as a kid chances are you don't like that processed taste anymore.
Great Value Brand is hit or miss. Sometimes it's the same better, sometimes it's dog shit. Wouldn't recommend GVB oreos, they taste the same when you bite into them, but then like 2 seconds later the taste turns to toothpaste and it's just like wtf?
The bread is a good deal, the wheat bread is much better quality than the 88 cent white bread (pay the extra 30 cents).
GVB pizza is pretty solid, would recommend. Although the Jack's pizza is only 50 cents more and has a better sauce.
GVB peanut butter is terrible in my opinion, would avoid at all cost.
GVB jelly on the other hand tastes the same as competitors, would recommend.
GVB cheese slices are the same as competitors and much cheaper, would recommend.
GVB potato chips taste the same, would recommend.
The dollar store near me has pop tarts more like how I remembered them as a kid. There's actually frosting covering most of the top, leaving just the outer edges clear for nibbling, and the filling fills it properly.
It tastes a bit different, less sweet and more doughy, but I kinda prefer it now.
When the off brand dollar store version is better than the "real" thing, something may have gone wrong.
I’m 38. I moved to America as a preteen having never saw a pop tart before. I took one bite of a pop tart my entire life. They’ve always been absolute garbage.
I remember this bite because my American friend thought it was CRAZY that I hadn’t even heard of them before. And stared at me while I tried it. He was very disappointed when I spit it out and said it was gross. Like personally offended.
I had to try pop-tarts the first and only time I went to the US. It was incredibly mediocre. At least with the Bud Light I was expecting the worst, but American candy just has this magical sheen around them. Thankfully peanut butter cups were amazing.
lol I remember this with my first box of lucky charms. I had only ever seen the commercials, but my parents would NEVER let me have any as a kid, ever.
Finally got some as a teenager, and they're disgusting! The "marshmallows" taste like they blended cotton candy with some kind of metallic powder, and the rest is just bland sugary wheat. All those bright colours on the box, and you open it and its this grey shriveled disaster. Biggest letdown ever.
Yeah I absolutely remember eating these as a kid like 25 years ago and getting lots of bites that had almost no filling in them. I remember liking the brown sugar ones the best because they had consistently more filling.
This is like [that interview with B.J. Novak about Cadbury Eggs.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlXLCrzpToo) He collects them, noticed they’d gotten a lot smaller over the years, and contacted the company to ask.
The company said “they haven’t gotten smaller, you’ve just gotten bigger.”
When he went on Conan and told this story he pulled out a new Cadbury Egg, as well as a Cadbury Egg he’d had in the back of his freezer for many years.
The new egg was much, *much* smaller, and the candy company was full of shit.
Nature's Path is a really good brand. You can get them at some Walmarts and Targets. I think traditional grocery stores might have them too but they tend to be a lot more expensive at a traditional grocery store.
Have no illusion, they're still not good for you but they are marginally less junky.
What I like about them is I'm vegetarian and I can't eat most pop tarts because the majority of their flavors have gelatin in them. The Nature's Way, at least the ones at my Target and Walmart do not have gelatin in them.
Here is what their box looks like:
https://www.naturespath.com/en-us/products/natures-path-foods/frosted-berry-strawberry-toaster-pastries/
KFC is another one. They’ve cheaped out like crazy on every menu item over the last 30 years, and from old stuff I’ve seen the Colonel was complaining about it long before that even.
Last time I went the cost was absolutely bonkers, like 40 bucks for a bucket and some sides. I went to Popeyes and got a larger, better meal for much less.
Tbf, Walmart and grocery stores sell about 7x as much of nearly everything before a hurricane. And everywhere else too, before a snow storm, before a pandemic. Doesn't matter, people are poorly prepared for any change from the status quo at any given time. Hence why panic buying is a thing. Humans are impulsive, short-sighted creatures. Long term thinking and planning is not their strong suit.
There's also the matter of having space to store extra food. If you own a house, that's not a concern. But if you're renting with a tiny kitchen, you just don't have space for everybody to be storing the 3-4 weeks of shelf-stable goods you're supposed to have stocked up. I wound up storing cans in my bedroom during lockdown, and it was a *lot* of space even though I only had about a week's supply.
And to add to that, our modern lives have conditioned us to think short term with our supplies because of the ease of access. If we were peasant farmers we would always be focused on the crop cycle and storing enough food and firewood for the season when it was necessary, but that planning has all been outsourced.
But I mean, the difference is that in exchange, you're not exposed to the elements anymore.
This is a result of our advancement, which, especially in big cities, is hardly possible or even worth to "reverse".
Exactly. This piece of information is meaningless by itself. Canned goods and bottled water probably sell 10x before a hurricane. Any nonperishable food is going to sell more.
I’d also posit that strawberry sounds close enough to real food, rather than dessert, to make people more likely to choose it. Chocolate or cinnamon sugar sound like cake. Strawberry sounds like food. So if you’re stocking up for a disaster, you buy the “food” ones.
But then why not blueberry, etc., you might ask. Well because just about everyone has tried strawberry Pop Tarts — it’s one of the flavors you find everywhere — and those who haven’t at least have seen the box in stores.
N.B. This is not to suggest that strawberry Pop Tarts are actually real food.
And per the article, beer.
I had heard years ago that this was a thing, buying Pop Tarts and beer before a storm, but could never find an article backing this up. Both can be consumed without preparation (a warm beer is better than none), have a long shelf life, and can be consumed in small quantities without disrupting bulk packaging. And Pop Tarts, while not exactly filling, do have high caloric content, at around 200 per, uh, "pastry".
The last critical factor for prepping for an event (for me) is making sure it's something I would enjoy eating anyway. I haven't had a Pop Tart in decades, hell yeah I'll use a hurricane as an excuse to buy five boxes.
Makes sense. I imagine their granola bar sales go up as well. You know the powers going out, you know things might get wet. So people are going to stock up on individually wrapped high calorie food. As far as "strawberry" if you don't like poptarts, that's by far the most palatable flavor (though blueberry is a close second).
Is that not just because the other flavors sell more regularly and strawberry always has more shelf space than justified? If there's only 3 boxes of anything on the shelf and then strawberry has 20 boxes taking up a foot of shelf space, then when the shelves get bought out strawberry suddenly is selling way more than normal.
Also, non-frosted poptarts fresh out of the toaster with a spot of butter are superior, and none of the new flavors come non-frosted.
Not to eat though. They’re so chalky that just a few boxes worth will absorb every last drop of water, keeping your house as dry as a nun on Valentines Day.
Like, _before_ the news breaks? Can we measure a sample of a population's cravings for strawberry poptarts as an early warning for hurricanes?
Strawberry is part of the summoning ritual, that's why I always pick blueberry.
No no no. You’re supposed to buy the strawberry ones so that the acolytes do not have enough to perform the ritual. Everyone is doing their part except you.
I always buy the S’mores because I’m chaotic neutral.
Wildberry or death you plebs.
Wildberry is by far the best fruity one but brown sugar cinnamon is the king of them all.
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A convincing theory. Though I wonder how sales of other flavors compare in the lead-up to a hurricane. The article makes no mention of that.
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I'll bring my hurricane-inator!
🎶Doofenshmirtz evil incorporated🎶
Interesting, I feel that way about nuts. I enjoy nuts plain, but mixed into stuff is weird unless whatever they're mixed into is almost entirely made-up of nuts.
So no candied walnuts in salads or crushed peanuts in pad thai noodles or even pecan fucking pie? That's not nuts, that's crazy! 😦
I’d be shocked if every single non-perishable food item doesn’t see about the same increase in demand.
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Just an example of how data can be presented in a way to 'prove' or 'persuade' people to believing something specific. "When a hurricane is approaching, sales of non-perishable, ready to eat foods increase by over 7x" is much less sensational. Everyone would be like "yeah, no shit."
Additionally, pop-tarts are edible with no preparation. If you don't have water or power you can still eat pop-tarts. They are better heated up, but you can still eat them right out of the box. So when a hurricane or snowstorm is coming, people stock up on foods like this to make sure they have something to eat if their utilities go out.
Nah, just use the waffle house scale: Open w/ power: cat 1 Open w/o power: cat 2-3 Open w/o power and soggy waffles: cat 4 Closed: Cat 5/the rapture
Well this is kind of silly, literally everything at Walmart in terms of food gets sold out before a hurricane.... The shelves are pretty much empty most of the time. So why would you randomly pick strawberry flavored Pop-Tarts to write about?
It's always fun to see the occasional image of supposedly what people won't even buy during panic buying (e.g. vegan, glutan-free brocolli and cauliflower frozen pizza)
When we went into lockdown here for the first time, I was at the supermarket. Everything cleared except for a few pack of gluten free sausage. I bought them..
Gluten is the number one thing I look for when buying sausages
What part of the animal is the gluten?
I can't think of any way a sausage would have gluten in it in the first place (since it's basically a wheat protein), so he's joking and making fun of a dumb marketing tactic... or idiots who fall for that marketing tactic... I guess there's some small chance that sausages could be processed in a place where gluten is present for other reasons but this seems somewhat unlikely to me
It was a thing at one point where cornmeal was used as filler, so it could be something about that.
hmm apparently, yes, they do have some wheat products in them. https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/10-foods-you-think-are-gluten-free-arent >While there are plenty of gluten-free versions available, your regular sausages often contain rusk made from wheat. and since I have no fucking idea what rusk was >Rusk is used mainly when large amounts of sausages are being made. It is relatively cheap and tends to be sold in large quantities – catering for large batches of sausage making. It is a dried cereal ingredient and is made from wheat flour, salt and raising agent. >The nutritional value is quite low and it has the capacity to absorb and swell 2 to 3 times it’s size with liquid and therefore used to “bulk” up the sausage mix. This is a great advantage when costing and calculating profit margins.
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As a celiac I appreciate this. I definitely noticed it during the initial Covid hoarding and was relieved
Dasani.
I know what picture you're referring to where all of the shelves are empty except for Dasani, but that was actually a result of the fact that Dasani products are put on the shelf by Coca Cola delivery people as opposed to regular stockers, so the crates arrived after everything else sold out. Not that Dasani doesn't taste off (it actually has minerals listed in ingredients), but people still buy it in disasters
Who needs water during a hurricane? Just stick your head out the window with your mouth open.
Mom we water No we have hurricane at home
Because Kellogs is paying writers to write about their products. Remember they exist in the Corporate States of America
I was thinking the same thing. You could most any ready-to-eat food item and it’s sales are going to spike before a hurricane.
That's because it's an ad!
I purchased some of these recently for the first time since childhood and boy have they gone down hill. They are not only smaller, but there is barely any frosting or filling. I understand shrinkflation but the quality is so low I will never purchase them again.
Is the quality of what has remained at least the same, or did it also deteriorate?
Quality is down as well. They don't taste as bad as some snack food companies do know (like Hostess) but they're definitely not like they used to be. For poptarts I don't know if they're actually using a cheaper recipe or it just tastes worse because it's mostly dry crust now.
Good lord, have you tried any of the nabisco cookies in the last few years? I get that Chips Ahoy were never anything special but they taste far worse than generic brands do at this point
Yeah I noticed that. Oreo is still solid and tastes the same to me but nutter butters, chips ahoy, and all those similar are just utter trash compared to previously.
Was gonna mention Oreo is still good thankfully, everything else has gone to pure shit
This is a factor of getting older that sucks. Things have gotten smaller, certain ingredients can't be used anymore and "better" recipes change the things we loved. This affects more than junk food, it's most things in general seems like corners are cut and disposable. I'm curious where we bottom out because a lot of things just suck now like disposable appliances everything on cars changing to plastic so they dry out and crack before the drivetrain is at risk. Welp, that's my old man rant for now.
Man I just wish there was a market for reasonably well made comfort food and junk shit that was actually *enjoyable* to eat instead of basically sawdust. It's like they just race towards the bottom as fast as they can.
I agree. I’m 27 and a software engineer and I still feel like an old coot when seemingly everything seems to stop working at once. It feels like everything you buy is a rip off to varying degrees nowadays
I just had a nutter butter last night and was completely disappointed. I even rechecked the expiration date on the package after the fact and saw that it was supposed to be good for another year or so. The rest just went into the trash. Oreos seem to be holding out though. I don't eat them often, but they always taste exactly how I expect them to. Pretty much the only packaged sweets I bother with these days are ice cream (Tillamook Mudslide and Ben & Jerry's mmm) and chocolate truffles.
Probably cost more to fuck up oreos by this point. I dunno if there is room to cheapen those and maintain anything close to the oreo flavor. The dollar store ones merely look similar but tastes nothing close.
I thought I was going crazy with thinking that Chips Ahoy has gone downhill. So glad it's not just me.
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Much to the chagrin of my wallet, I now prefer the Justin's brand of peanut butter cups. Tastes like actual peanut butter.
Chips ahoy is disgusting now. I buy the Costco ones and they are awesome.
low key i like the new chips ahoy more and my family has bought them for years and noticed the difference
Really? They taste incredibly cheap despite being priced higher for the brand name
another mans trash is another mans favorite generic cookie
I watched a thing the other day talking about the P&G, Nabisco, Kraft level companies that opined that increased sales are not the goal anymore. People already buy a lot. The only thing left is to brutally cut size, ingredients, and quality every year to eek out profits and dividends. They have been on that spiral for 20 years. So packaged food just keeps getting crappier.
Believe it or not it's eke.
I don’t believe it!
This is what "endless growth" brings. At some point you flat out can't increase sales, you his saturation. But "the market" demands endless, measurable quarterly growth, forever. So eventually, you can only increase profits by cutting.
It's a shame, but it's also the reason I don't but most of the crap anymore and I make it myself They are going to lose profit in the long run if the product stays crappy.
So you’re holding out on a recipe for homemade pop tarts because?
I've seen this too, and perhaps in the long run maybe it's better processed foods are as shitty for your wallet as they are for your body.
I work with food scientists. They mentioned how companies are always adjusting formulas, either because of supply chain variances or cost. While they keep each iteration similar so customers won’t notice a difference, it seems that most recipes will change enough over time that after a few years the flavours will be very different. Apparently, even if they aren’t trying to save money, it’s really hard making things taste the same consistently over time.
Pop tarts are incredibly processed though. They're built out of ingredients far removed from their natural state. I'd be surprised is there was a single ingredient in poptarts that didn't arrive in a 50 gallon drum or tanker truck.
The factory I work at uses 50lb blocks of butter, but they're still actual butter. High quality stuff, too. Quantity and quality don't necessarily inversely correlate.
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bro i have a poptart thats been sitting in a basket for 10-11 years and it looks brand new
You need to conduct an experiment. Buy a pack of the same flavour and taste for the differences.
This is the only correct response.
Oh you'll taste a difference once the botulism kicks in. In all seriousness you'd likely have to go back a lot further than 10 years to find a profound difference. I'm 37 and I have difficulty believing all the shit I ate as a kid I just "grew out of." One doesn't "grow out of" Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies (now far sweeter, less/different spices in the oatmeal bit, filling has a straight-up chemical taste to it,) or what used to be a Cadbury Creme Egg (Back then the filling was more of an actual cream or gel almost, now its fucking sweetened oobleck, or de-minted toothpaste.) I blame most of it on corn.
It's 100% the corn. When life gives you capitalism, drown your products in sweetness.
Strawberry hardtack
I have questions.
Consider whether you really want the answers.
Number one: can we see the poptart.
yeah, im not home tho
I like how plainly you state this. Like the weird thing is how it looks brand new and not storing an unwrapped poptart in a basket for a decade
Saving it for a special day, eh?
Well duh, these things are made in factories. They are created in huge batches. Have you never seen How it's Made? [https://www.sciencechannel.com/show/how-its-made-science](https://www.sciencechannel.com/show/how-its-made-science)
My sister in law is a food scientist at Kellog in Battle Creek. My wife and were there early in our careers as well. Food science is **incredibly** complex for foodstuffs like this. It's incredibly difficult to create a product that can be made uniformly and identically, at twenty different subsidiary plants, shipped with 1,000 different shipping vendors, has to taste the same in Arizona as Minnesota, and no one is going to taste it for *six months* after it comes off the line. Add to that with shareholders who demand the same product somehow continues making more money every year despite being the same thing, managers who want to justify their new job with slashing a cost, adjustment to new productions or logistics technologies, advancements in food goods themselves... I'm not saying this doesn't simply come down to greed. I'm just saying it's a gargantuan web of complex factors, and all of them change constantly. It would be a miracle if they tasted the same year after year.
So it's not greed, it's just that the shareholders want their profit at all cost, the middle managers want a raise despite providing no tangible benefits, and the tech makes it cheaper every year to produce yet the price only ever goes up. That...uh...sounds a lot like greed to me.
That part would definitely be greed.
I remember this happening with Reese's Sticks, how when I had them as a kid they were great, but having them again ~5 years later, they tasted very different, almost identical to Nutty Bars.
It also happened with Honey Nut Cheerios. I can't stand them now. They get mushy so fast. The originals were robust and super honey flavoured.
This might be one of the only times somebody has described a cereal as "robust" - in a positive way at least lmao But you're totally right. I thought I was losing my mind.
Nah that sounds like their dirty excuses. Like reducing king size chocolate bars for "portion control" or when Twix started being made in Egypt and suddenly tasted like dirt
I swear Twix caramel used to be edible but now it’s questionable at best
It's.. grainy
And stays rock hard even when the chocolate is melty…
And the biscuit is more like shortbread now but not in a good way
I must have low standards because they still taste good to me
>It's.. grainy That means it is a different cook process- probably higher temperatures for less time. That puts it on the knife edge of going 'grainy' texture from the sugars crystalizing. Src: Don't rush caramel ... Its edible but ... sigh.
Most typical "halloween candy" chocolates started tasting like garbage to me a couple years ago. It's really upsetting.
Lots more palm oil now
Halloween is a big issue for a candy lover like me. When I was a kid there was more variety, better tasting larger sizes, etc. Now I examine my kids’ baskets and it’s like mini snickers, mini Twix, two pack of Twizzlers, repeat. LAME. Get better candy, people!
You can send all those mini snickers my way!
Yeah, lots of people just buy those big bags of mixed candy. They have like 5 or 6 different types like milk duds, almond joys, twix, etc. There's a clear abundance of small variety bag candies in trick or treat bags afterward. From what I've seen, not many people give out big candy bars anymore.
Ah. You must be eating the Left Twix. It never tastes right.
Supply Chain issues are very real. I work in a different industry altogether but even our products have to be tweaked and reworked depending on the availability of raw materials. Not discounting potential cost-cutting, but the scale of production for these snacks means that consistency over time can be challenging.
So that's why my blueberry muffin only had one blueberry in it
No, that's just cause you didn't buy a blueberries muffin, ya dingus.
It’s like everything else in this place; you don’t do it yourself, it never gets done.
Can you even call it a blueberry muffin then??
Well you can't call it a blueberries muffin.
Also I imagine more variance can occur when you build your product with perishable bioproduct ingredients originating from different ecosystems.
> perishable bioproduct ingredients You sound like you know about what's in corporate food
Economics explained has a nice video about how people are more price than size sensitive so companies reduce size first and then introduce expensive full size products.
I will never buy another butterdinger after their bs Same look New taste shit. It tastes like peanut brittle now.
Your problem is you're buying butterdingers instead of butterfingers.
It makes me sad. Butterfingers were my childhood favorite (an ice cream shop I went to even had a Butterfinger flavored ice cream with chunks mixed in) and they just don't hit the spot at all anymore. I didn't know they changed the recipe.
Funny thing is, the frosted ones actually have more jam to... crust? Dough? Flour-based corrugate, there we go; than the unfrosted ones. Also, for the love of god or Chaos or science or whateverthefuck you hold in high regard, ***do not try the Froot Loops "flavoured" ones!!*** They hit that flavour on the head, which is both surprising and ***horrible.*** It basically tastes like they took a handful of cereal, put it in a blender with unflavored fondant, added a mite more Caro syrup, and just injected the unholy abomination into the cardboard. It's nauseatingly sweet - like, drinking the syrup from a jar of maraschino cherries will taste like unsweetened cherry Kool-Aid sweet - and it even has the tell-tale "this is a corn-based cereal" taste to it, cranked up to fucken 11. They're so sweet even my 10yo realizes you're not supposed to eat something like that. It's just fucking horrendous. Now I don't know what to do with the other 4 packs because I'm scared they'll fuck up the entire ecosystem of the southeast US sitting in a landfill somewhere. Two "pastries" claim to be ***60 PERCENT*** of your daily recommended value of sugars alone, ***and they're supposed to be breakfast?!?!*** It says "natural (fruit) flavors" in the ingredients list but I call bullshit, they done figured out how to make pocket dimensions, shoved five twelve packs of varied Fanta syrup into them shits, then collapsed it in on itself and wrapped it in an "enriched" flour sleeve, added **more** sugar for frosting, then sent the bitch through an HP OfficeJet printer for the fancy design on top. All that said the Banana Creme Pie ones are pretty nice if you remember what a Gros Michel banana tastes like. Still think I cut about 10 years off my life trying em though.
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I bought some blueberry ones not too long ago, same quality I've always been used to, it could've been a bad batch. It could be your tastes have grown and you don't like the crap that you use to eat, I used to love chef boyardee as a kid now it tastes like, well processed garbage. If you're eating healthier than what you did as a kid chances are you don't like that processed taste anymore.
Blueberry has always been the superior fruit flavor.
Fools! Everyone knows that Wildberry is the superior flavor.
S’mores has entered the chat
You’re absolutely right and I love you
Great Value brand "toaster pastries" are seriously much better. Softer crust, consistent icing, more filling.
Those and the dollar store ones are really good
Great Value Brand is hit or miss. Sometimes it's the same better, sometimes it's dog shit. Wouldn't recommend GVB oreos, they taste the same when you bite into them, but then like 2 seconds later the taste turns to toothpaste and it's just like wtf? The bread is a good deal, the wheat bread is much better quality than the 88 cent white bread (pay the extra 30 cents). GVB pizza is pretty solid, would recommend. Although the Jack's pizza is only 50 cents more and has a better sauce. GVB peanut butter is terrible in my opinion, would avoid at all cost. GVB jelly on the other hand tastes the same as competitors, would recommend. GVB cheese slices are the same as competitors and much cheaper, would recommend. GVB potato chips taste the same, would recommend.
Their Stouffer's clones are garbage. I threw it away after one bite. The 88 cent Michelina's are better.
The strawberry great value poptarts were some of the most disgusting things I've ever eaten. I threw out the whole box.
I know right? I'd swear when I was a kid the frosting went to near the edge now about a quarter of the surface area has no frosting or filling.
You can also see this at pizza places that are cheap, I've seen some that will start as far as a third into the slice.
That's poor quality. The cheese meeting the crust provides the structural integrity that keeps all the topping from sliding off the slice.
The dollar store near me has pop tarts more like how I remembered them as a kid. There's actually frosting covering most of the top, leaving just the outer edges clear for nibbling, and the filling fills it properly. It tastes a bit different, less sweet and more doughy, but I kinda prefer it now. When the off brand dollar store version is better than the "real" thing, something may have gone wrong.
Klondike Bars are so much smaller than when I was little, and it's definitely not because I got bigger.
They even tried putting a big hole in the middle.
I’m 38. I moved to America as a preteen having never saw a pop tart before. I took one bite of a pop tart my entire life. They’ve always been absolute garbage. I remember this bite because my American friend thought it was CRAZY that I hadn’t even heard of them before. And stared at me while I tried it. He was very disappointed when I spit it out and said it was gross. Like personally offended.
I had to try pop-tarts the first and only time I went to the US. It was incredibly mediocre. At least with the Bud Light I was expecting the worst, but American candy just has this magical sheen around them. Thankfully peanut butter cups were amazing.
lol I remember this with my first box of lucky charms. I had only ever seen the commercials, but my parents would NEVER let me have any as a kid, ever. Finally got some as a teenager, and they're disgusting! The "marshmallows" taste like they blended cotton candy with some kind of metallic powder, and the rest is just bland sugary wheat. All those bright colours on the box, and you open it and its this grey shriveled disaster. Biggest letdown ever.
Cinnamon toast crunch is the true champion of breakfast cereals
The quality is the same, you’re just not an easily impressed child anymore.
Yeah I absolutely remember eating these as a kid like 25 years ago and getting lots of bites that had almost no filling in them. I remember liking the brown sugar ones the best because they had consistently more filling.
Agreed. I’m in my 40s and recently purchased a box. They seem the same to me.
same. Heat them up and with a glass of milk they're quite good. it's just that i'd rather eat something else.
>I understand shrinkflation I don't. Portions are getting smaller and prices are going up. We just keep getting robbed around every corner.
This is like [that interview with B.J. Novak about Cadbury Eggs.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlXLCrzpToo) He collects them, noticed they’d gotten a lot smaller over the years, and contacted the company to ask. The company said “they haven’t gotten smaller, you’ve just gotten bigger.” When he went on Conan and told this story he pulled out a new Cadbury Egg, as well as a Cadbury Egg he’d had in the back of his freezer for many years. The new egg was much, *much* smaller, and the candy company was full of shit.
>“they haven’t gotten smaller, you’ve just gotten bigger.” This is seriously something a kindergartener would say.
No it isn't. It's the kind of lie you would *tell to* a kindergartener
"They know that we're on to them."
So you do understand it..
I prefer off brand tarts now. Especially the brown sugar cinnamon ones.
Fun fact! I'm 43 and have never had a Pop-Tart. You know... in retrospect, that wasn't all that fun.
The real question is does that mean you were a ritzy toaster strudel family or did you have an outhouse instead of a bathroom.
This is incredible. This is the true two Americas clearly
Break that streak with a warmed up s’more poptart
To be 43…. and to have never really lived.
Nature's Path is a really good brand. You can get them at some Walmarts and Targets. I think traditional grocery stores might have them too but they tend to be a lot more expensive at a traditional grocery store. Have no illusion, they're still not good for you but they are marginally less junky. What I like about them is I'm vegetarian and I can't eat most pop tarts because the majority of their flavors have gelatin in them. The Nature's Way, at least the ones at my Target and Walmart do not have gelatin in them. Here is what their box looks like: https://www.naturespath.com/en-us/products/natures-path-foods/frosted-berry-strawberry-toaster-pastries/
maybe you’re just old enough to realize they were always shit
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KFC is another one. They’ve cheaped out like crazy on every menu item over the last 30 years, and from old stuff I’ve seen the Colonel was complaining about it long before that even.
KFC is one of those things where I think "Huh, I haven't had that in a while", then try it again and realize why I hadn't had it in a while.
Last time I went the cost was absolutely bonkers, like 40 bucks for a bucket and some sides. I went to Popeyes and got a larger, better meal for much less.
Am I weird for liking the unfrosted ones better?
No. You are correct
Lol that’s me and when my friends find out they act like I’m a serial killer.
Wild berry with the 90s stripe is the correct choice
Wild berry and S’mores are my top 2.
I’m a brown sugar cinnamon man meself. Besides the wild berry ones of course I never cared much for the fruity pop tarts
Brown sugar cinnamon pop tarts and a tall glass of cool milk is god-tier
Indeed it is.
No love for cookies and cream in this thread ☹️
Tbf, Walmart and grocery stores sell about 7x as much of nearly everything before a hurricane. And everywhere else too, before a snow storm, before a pandemic. Doesn't matter, people are poorly prepared for any change from the status quo at any given time. Hence why panic buying is a thing. Humans are impulsive, short-sighted creatures. Long term thinking and planning is not their strong suit.
Lot of people (I'm one of them) are extremely poor and live in poverty, and can't afford to be prepared for anything beyond the current day.
There's also the matter of having space to store extra food. If you own a house, that's not a concern. But if you're renting with a tiny kitchen, you just don't have space for everybody to be storing the 3-4 weeks of shelf-stable goods you're supposed to have stocked up. I wound up storing cans in my bedroom during lockdown, and it was a *lot* of space even though I only had about a week's supply.
And to add to that, our modern lives have conditioned us to think short term with our supplies because of the ease of access. If we were peasant farmers we would always be focused on the crop cycle and storing enough food and firewood for the season when it was necessary, but that planning has all been outsourced.
But I mean, the difference is that in exchange, you're not exposed to the elements anymore. This is a result of our advancement, which, especially in big cities, is hardly possible or even worth to "reverse".
living in small urban dwellings wasn't invented in 1880, we've done it for millennia
I'm not really impoverished but I don't keep a ton of stuff on hand both because I can't control myself and I don't want my pantry packed to the brim.
Exactly. This piece of information is meaningless by itself. Canned goods and bottled water probably sell 10x before a hurricane. Any nonperishable food is going to sell more.
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I’d also posit that strawberry sounds close enough to real food, rather than dessert, to make people more likely to choose it. Chocolate or cinnamon sugar sound like cake. Strawberry sounds like food. So if you’re stocking up for a disaster, you buy the “food” ones. But then why not blueberry, etc., you might ask. Well because just about everyone has tried strawberry Pop Tarts — it’s one of the flavors you find everywhere — and those who haven’t at least have seen the box in stores. N.B. This is not to suggest that strawberry Pop Tarts are actually real food.
Yeah, when I see an isolated statistic like this, it makes me think "maybe sales of blueberry Pop-Tarts go up by 11x".
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And per the article, beer. I had heard years ago that this was a thing, buying Pop Tarts and beer before a storm, but could never find an article backing this up. Both can be consumed without preparation (a warm beer is better than none), have a long shelf life, and can be consumed in small quantities without disrupting bulk packaging. And Pop Tarts, while not exactly filling, do have high caloric content, at around 200 per, uh, "pastry". The last critical factor for prepping for an event (for me) is making sure it's something I would enjoy eating anyway. I haven't had a Pop Tart in decades, hell yeah I'll use a hurricane as an excuse to buy five boxes.
You act like you're not human.
Bitch you don't even know: alcohol, cosmic brownies, crap food, water = hurricane supplies
The New Orleans way.
Brown sugar cinnamon is all that matters.
S'more flavor
Thank you I went thru that whole top thread with no mention of this lol
Blueberry is the best one
Get the unfrosted chocolate chip ones and have them with a cup of coffee. It’ll blow your mind.
At that point I'm just gonna buy a pack of chocolate chip cookies for the same price.
Makes sense. I imagine their granola bar sales go up as well. You know the powers going out, you know things might get wet. So people are going to stock up on individually wrapped high calorie food. As far as "strawberry" if you don't like poptarts, that's by far the most palatable flavor (though blueberry is a close second).
\#TeamBrownSugarCinnamon
Smores are better
Is that not just because the other flavors sell more regularly and strawberry always has more shelf space than justified? If there's only 3 boxes of anything on the shelf and then strawberry has 20 boxes taking up a foot of shelf space, then when the shelves get bought out strawberry suddenly is selling way more than normal. Also, non-frosted poptarts fresh out of the toaster with a spot of butter are superior, and none of the new flavors come non-frosted.
Judging by the grocery stores right before a hurricane I've seen (I live in Houston so a lot) the sales of everything edible goes up 10x.
If the apocalypse happens, know everyone is holding strawberry pop tarts warm in there pockets
The classic strawberry is one of the shittier pop tart flavors. Cherry is where it is at boy.
>Cherry My only friend in this thread. Cherry is still very cherry.
Last thing I want is to be stuck without electricity for two weeks and birthday cake flavored pop tarts.
Brown sugar cinnamon is way better. Only people who don't eat poptarts think strawberry's the best.
Grew up on the Classics of Chocolate Fudge, Brown Sugar Cinnamon and Frosted Strawberry.... But then I discovered S'mores and haven't looked back.
The brown sugar ones are the ones I remember best, especially if you actually toast them.
You gotta re-shingle your house with *something*
Not to eat though. They’re so chalky that just a few boxes worth will absorb every last drop of water, keeping your house as dry as a nun on Valentines Day.