July 12, 2024 • 23 mins
We salute six decades of America’s preeminent toaster pastry by serving up some notable pieces of Pop-Tarts marketing and ranking the most iconic Pop-Tarts flavors.
Get show notes for this episode and check out past episodes of the Speaking Human podcast by visiting speakinghuman.com.
#Podcast #SpeakingHuman #VO #Branding #Marketing #Advertising #Business #PopTarts #Brands #Ads #simplify #popculture #Kellanova #Strawberry #Kelloggs
Get show notes for this episode and check out past episodes of the Speaking Human podcast by visiting speakinghuman.com.
#Podcast #SpeakingHuman #VO #Branding #Marketing #Advertising #Business #PopTarts #Brands #Ads #simplify #popculture #Kellanova #Strawberry #Kelloggs
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Speeding Human. Today, on SpeakingHuman, we salute six decades of America's
pre eminent toaster pastry by serving upsome notable pieces of pop Tarts marketing and
ranking the most iconic Pop Tarts flavors. Specking Human. Welcome to Speaking Human,
(00:29):
where we simplify the world of marketingfor humans. I'm Shad Calmly and
with me is my co host PatrickJebber. Patrick. As sometimes is the
case, the process of naming thisepisode not a straight line, much like
how pop Tarts has come out withsome flavors over the years that just didn't
(00:50):
hit the spot. Remember root BeerAnyone? We spitball a few different title
ideas that didn't quite stick. Youthink we should share some those titles with
the listeners here right now, pullback the curtain a little bit. We
could? We could. I'll startus off. We heart Tarts. I'm
not opposed to using it. Whatabout still popping tarts? Yeah? I
(01:14):
mean is that a line? Arewe crossing the line there? Pop locking
tarts? That would be cool?Yeah? What about toasting six decades of
tasty Tarts? I like that.I like tasty tarts. She got the
alliteration in there, too, whichis how about this one? This is
kind of leveling up a little bit. You tell me if this one's still
all right? Hot Tarts in theirgolden years. Yeah, yeah, I
(01:37):
think that's okay. Hot Tarts intheir golden years. You know, we're
talking about pop tarts hitting an anniversary. It's kind of in its golden years.
And when they are toasted, theyget like a golden brown. Yeah,
yeah, exactly. I like that. Okay, that's free marketing right
there, free marketing ideas for popTarts and Kelenova Kelenova, not to be
(02:02):
confused with Kellogg's. I didn't knowthat, did you know it? What
Kelenova Kelenova? Yeah. Until Iwas like reading up on pop tarts,
I had never heard of Kelenova.That does not compute with my brain very
well. Yeah, it's weird becauseit feels like a futuristic sci fi novel
about the sun, as you mayor may not have gathered at this point.
(02:24):
We're talking about pop Tarts today.The brand a breakfast snack staple,
especially to us eighties nineties kids whobasically lived off the things. That's how
we got our sustenance, our power, our energy. Celebrating a major milestone
this year. One critical question foryou, Patrick, before we dive into
(02:46):
some marketing talk about pop tarts.How do you prefer your pop tarts?
You like them hot or you likethem cold? I think I definitely like
them hot or at least warm.I like, I don't like them to
be too hot, though, LikeI don't want them to be hot pockets
hot where it's inferno, you know. But but I mean, I think,
(03:07):
if we're being honest, you canreally love pop tarts hotter cold.
Maybe you even like your pop tartsfrozen. I don't know. I can't.
I can't. There's no judgments here, right, No, I mean,
anyway, it's fine. Do youlike them hotter cold or like,
what's what's your preference? I youknow, both are good, but I'm
I'd prefer it warmed up. There'sa there's like a really almost like perfect
(03:31):
temperature. And I don't even usea toaster anymore because we don't we actually
don't have a toaster. But foryears I would just put in a microwave
for like eleven seconds. No,okay, I'm perfect temperature. I've always
toasted. I don't know if I'veever put in a microwave. I'm not
opposed, but yeah, it doesn'tkeep it as Chris, Yeah, yeah,
(03:53):
yeah, And you know I likethat you said it gave us our
power, our sustenance, our power. That's what we ran off of.
Yeah, like tarts and hot pocketsand any you know, other packaged goods.
But that brings us to why we'reeven doing a pop Tarts episode.
Yeah, why are we talking aboutthese things? A lot of people are
(04:15):
gonna say, Oh, you guysare just riding the bandwagon way too late
on the Seinfeld movie. Seinfeld moviethat just came out on Netflix. That's
not true. That's not true.Let's just tell you right here. I'm
gonna say it. Not true.Okay, it's not the reason why we
decide to have this episode. It'sreally because pop Tarts, the brand,
(04:38):
turns sixty. Big birthday. It'sa huge birthday. So to mark the
sixtieth anniversary of the pop Tarts firsthitting the store shelves, we thought we'd
give a little bit of pop Tarthistory and then talk about our favorite flavors
of pop Tarts and also our favoritemarketing that pop Tarts has done over years,
(05:00):
paying homage to a brand that hasbeen. You know, it's not
one hundred, but sixty is notbad. It's been around all our lives
plus some. So it's a popTart extravaganza here today. Let's start with
some history. Tell us where thesethings came from. Patrick So, pop
Tarts were launched in sixty four.That's nineteen sixty four, believe it or
(05:24):
not, in a city not farfrom where this podcast comes from, Cleveland,
Ohio. Can you believe that that'sshocking right into your own backyard?
For all you trivia fans out there, if you didn't know this, there
were only four flavors to originally hitthe market in Cleveland, Strawberry, blueberry,
(05:48):
brown, sugar, cinnamon, andapple. Current, which pop Tarts
notes on their website is I believe, they say, since literally no no
one has ever seen a kurrante karrant. Yeah, we dropped that flavor.
Years later it came back as thefan favorite apple. I think that makes
(06:09):
sense. I don't know what akurant is. What is currant? I
think it's just a spice. I'veseen it, and I've seen it in
other things like pie, A smalldried fruit from a seedless variety of grape
originally grown in the eastern Mediterranean region, so not a seasoning anyway. Getting
off topic, pop Tarts were really, really successful. As you can imagine,
sixty years later, we're ac celebratingthis anniversary that the next year,
(06:33):
nineteen sixty five, pop Tarts wentnationwide. They were so successful they couldn't
keep up with demand. They literallythey had no idea they were going to
be this big fast forward. Todaypop Tarts might be more popular than ever,
with total sales in twenty twenty twoof nearly a billion dollars according to
(06:54):
CNBC report. But you can findit all over the place, even in
their own press releases. So popTarts, big birthday and still going strong
after all these years. It's oneof those brands that you know, as
a kid, we remember back andwe think fondly on this, you know,
the pop Tarts name, and alsojust the food itself, like how
(07:18):
good it is, how delicious weremember it to be. Do you still
eat pop Tarts? I don't,but my daughter does. She'll still eat
them for breakfast, and occasionally I'lllook at the box and be like,
I wish I allowed myself to eatthis stuff. Yeah, me too,
Me too. Like, just evenresearching for the podcast, I was watching
(07:38):
all the market I'm like, man, it's just tapping into my like cerebral
ape brain, and I'm like,I want that. Yeah, it's just
a brand that has that nostalgia isthere for us because they did a lot
of marketing in the eighties and thenineties for these, pounding us on television
because back then that's the way wegot all of our advertising. Yeah,
(07:59):
yeah, magazines and TV. Butit's tough. It's tough to stick around
ten years, twenty years, letalone sixty years and still be relevant.
But these are one of those productsthat's just you almost take for granted that
they're just there. And like Isaid, I ate them. My daughter
eats them now. I mean,if they keep going like this, I
imagine you know, their kids willstill eat them too. You know.
(08:20):
It's like a generational thing where that'sjust like a pop tarts, always delicious,
And I really love it has evolvedin the way that they pitch what
was once a breakfast replacement right nowit's more of like a snack. Don't
just think of it as breakfast,think of it as a snack. We're
so much more. Yeah, ananytime snack, so you kind of hit
(08:41):
on it. We're each gonna talkabout one. We picked out one marketing
effort from the product's sixty year history, obviously a lot to choose from that.
We wanted to kind of call outtalk about a little bit, and
we're each going to do that.Right now. You want to go first,
Patrick, No, I think youshould go first this time. Okay,
(09:01):
let me go first then, Solet me tell you ahead of time.
You know some of the runners upthings I thought about, you're gonna
do runners up. I thought aboutchoosing a nineteen eighty nine commercial that featured
the jingle so Hot They're cool,So cool They're Hot. I don't know
(09:22):
if you remember that, but itwas very nineteen eighty nine. I also
considered the pop Tarts packaging, whichI feel like that box is just very
vibrant and iconic, even going backdecades, it's kind of been like that.
But you know where I landed onwas something super recent. It comes
from twenty twenty three, and thisis pop Tart's first edible mascot. Now
(09:46):
here's how Variety described this effort atthe time it happened. The first ever
Pop Tarts Bowl introduced college football fansto a life size, actually edible Pop
Tarts mascot that was gleefully lowered intoa giant toaster and ravenously devoured by players
(10:07):
Thursday night. Named Strawberry, thepop Tarts mascot immediately went viral on social
media for its sacrificial yet delicious executionafter the college football game ended. Pretty
weird, Yeah, pretty wild.Yeah, got some attention. But you
know, this effort shows a PopTarts still has its spark after all these
(10:30):
years. It's still getting out there, still doing something loud. And you
know, a few notable things aboutthis, as you mentioned, trying to
get into that snack space. Youknow, we're not just breakfast. We're
out there college football. Which betterspot to kind of reach snacking fans showing
people, hey, we're a snack. It's also, you know, they
(10:50):
had this mascot go into a toasterand then they let the winning team eat
it alive, rip it apart.I don't know if a form of cannibalism
has been viewed by this many peoplesince the movie Alive. Yeah, it
was kind of a gross scene,but it's something, you know, it's
bold, it's out there it's kindof in your face, so you appreciate
(11:13):
a brand like pop Tarts, thatcould be like we're old, we're resting
on our laurels, we're cheerios.Yeah no, they're still they're still swinging
for the fences a little bit.And if you want to dig deeper into
a little bit of the subtext here, you've got to brand a product eating
itself alive on the national marketing stage. Is this a dig saying that brand
(11:37):
mascots are so disposable they should beeaten alive after every game, or maybe
it's saying we're devouring ourselves with ourrampant, out of control consumerism. Or
maybe it's just a goofy effort thatlooked kind of weird and gross and got
a lot of attention on social media. Either way, I thought it was
(11:58):
a really interesting move by pop Tarts, you know, staying in that national
consciousness. What'd you think of thisone? That to me is you know,
a fun stunt where you get peopletalking about it. You know,
it had the stage essentially in thatgame, and it was something super bizarre
and that people hadn't seen before.And I think that today it's one way
(12:20):
to go viral to get eyes everywhereon it is to do something like that.
I really liked that effort. I'mglad you pointed it out, because
in the early two thousands they hadthis Crazy Good campaign and they use these
anthropomorphic pastries like Strawberry who goes andjumps in the toaster at the game.
(12:41):
But they were represented sort of likein these doodal forms, you know,
like almost like you were in aschool desk, you know, and drawing,
and they were like little animations andstuff. In the Crazy Good campaign.
They were memorable because of this likesort of sense of humor that was
a little bit morbid. The treatsthemselves fled from people. They were going
(13:03):
to be eaten, right, theywere going to be eaten, and they
were running from the consumers who weregoing to consume them, which led to
the Agents of Crazy Good. TheAgents of Crazy Good sort of makes over
those characters that were doodles at onepoint and makes them into like three D
versions of them, and where theyused to flee from people who were going
(13:26):
to eat them, they go withit and they entice them to be hungry
and want to eat them, whichis like the stunt at the football game,
your strawberry jumping in that toaster.If I look back and actually think
about it a little more, evenlike looking at those like kind of eighties
and nineties commercial pop charts, wasalways kind of like this weird off kilter
a little bit. I mean Ieven look at their logo with the like
(13:50):
big O and the lowercase letters andstuff like that, almost like a childlike
mad scientist a little bit, justkind of like throwing things out there,
but with pretty clear ideas of whatthey were doing. Yeah, according to
Marketing dives right up on this.You know, it's just one of the
latest brands trying to tap into thatyou know, gen Z market because of
(14:11):
their spending power. So why doyou think this product? You know,
we've seen so many products. Wetalk about this all the time, like
brands that go to the graveyard,you know, disappear. We had this,
Ah, we had this for twentyfive years and now it's gone.
Why do you think this product isstuck around for sixty years? What is
it? What's the magic? I'mso glad you asked, Shad, and
(14:33):
I really am channeling my inner Shadtoday because I'm going to give you,
in my opinion, three things,oh beautiful. Number one is convenience.
You know, it solves a problemand makes breakfast, especially on the go,
convenient. Right, It's convenience anda food product. Form Number two
(14:56):
is cost. Right, they've keptthe cost of these so low per package
over the years, making it aneconomic option for breakfast. And that was
the big goal, right, wasto give people on on the go option
that was inexpensive. If you lookat the price. The original price of
a package of pop tarts was thirtynine cents in nineteen sixty three, and
(15:18):
forty five cents in sixty four andfifty six cents in twenty twenty three.
Fifty six cents from the inception thirtynine to fifty six cents. I mean
in sixty years, that's not alot, you know, comparatively, like
when you see a cereal big skyrocketsand you're like, I'm paying eight dollars
for that box of cereal. Socost. And then the third, which
(15:41):
I think is the most important,is cleverness. They've kept the nostalgic aspect
of the product and the original flavor, but also continue to cleverly create new
flavors that entice consumers of all agesto keep coming back. So it's a
clever, clever brand. Convenience,cost, and cleverness, the three c's.
I mean, it's illiterative, it'sin a trio. I love everything
(16:06):
about it. Yeah. You knowwhat I can add to that is,
you know what I was thinking isversatility. You have that with convenience.
You know, breakfast is its mainarea, but it can also be anything.
You know, it's packaged and it'scolorful like cereal, but you can
eat it on the go, youcan have it late at night, cold
or hot. It's junk food asmuch as breakfast food. I mean,
(16:27):
it's it's all purpose in many ways. Right. Yeah, and then something
maybe you didn't entirely hit on,but I think it's baked into the overall.
This is kind of a unicorn productin the sense there's not a lot
else directly competing with it. Youknow, there's toaster. Strudle is probably
like your closest thing in the breakfastspace or something, you know, if
(16:48):
you're talking about actual pastries, butit's kind of its own thing. Yeah,
there's not a lot that's like adirect you know, if you go
and get like a bag of chips, there's two hundred different varieties you go
to, it's cereal. You're competingwith that whole aisle, right, pop
Tarts. I mean there's not anisle of pop tarts. You know.
They kind of like stand alone istheir own thing, and I think that's
(17:08):
really helped them stand out over theyears. And that pop tarts are pop
charts. There's not There's not awhole lot that are like standing next to
them. You could even add thatfourth c. It could be convenience,
cost, cleverness and competition. There'snone. Ah oy. Yeah, it's
killer right there. That's a greatthat's a great list. It's one of
(17:30):
those brands it's stuck around, youknow, and it has to do that
in a lot of ways. Iwon't lie. They're marketing out of all
food products, almost like they havetheir finger on the pulse of that teen
slash maybe young adult mentality mm hm. And they haven't despite you know,
the generations changing, they haven't reallytaken their foot off the gas either.
(17:52):
They've kept it coming out. Theyhaven't like relaxed and just been like,
wow, people know pop Tarts,we don't really need to do anything.
So you got to give them creditfor that. Let's wrap things up here
today with one more thing, maybethe best thing we'll do all day.
We're gonna rank our picks for theall time three most iconic pop Tarts flavors.
(18:15):
So we're each gonna pick three.We're gonna see how we kind of
match up here. What do youhave? As we will go, We'll
go one by you want to goone by one? What do you have
as your number three? I wouldprobably say my number three would be s'mores.
I think the s'mores frosted s'mores poptarts. It's not the most iconic,
but it's delicious and has stuck aroundfor quite a while. Yeah.
(18:37):
Yeah, that one's been around fora good amount of time and it is
delicious. Yeah. My number three, I had strawberry, one of our
original flavors. Maybe should be higherup the best of the fruit flavors.
I think it's just a go toat this point. Yeah, that's my
number two for sure. Okay,yeah, number two, So my number
two. Then I have my favoriteflavor. I probably would have ranked it
(19:02):
higher, but I was like,I'm just so blind biased by how much
I like this, so I'm gonnaput it at number two. It's also
one of the originals, brown sugarcinnamon. Yeah, that's your favorite,
number one favorite. I love it. I'd one and give me a pack
right now. I'll crush him.Or would you tell yourself I can't do
that. I can't have that.That hot cinnamon taste so good. I
(19:27):
always like that as a kid.But I'll tell you I always come back
to this one, the frosted cherry. Oh, the frosted cherry. People
will say, what's the difference rightbetween frosted strawberry and frosted cherry. Don't
they say it taste the same?I mean, come on, Patrick,
and I would tell you, no, they don't taste the same. I
(19:48):
think as much as I like thisfrosted strawberry and reminds me of my youth,
I think the frosted cherry is theone that you can't get sick of.
I'm making that statement here. Youcan eat as many of the frosted
cherry and you won't get tired ofthat flavor. I'm probably one of the
people who kind of group them similarstrawberry and cherry. If I had them
(20:08):
in front of me, I don'teven know which one I would pick.
I mean, i'd be like staringat them, being like, ah,
I don't know, because in someways cherry sounds better to me, but
I feel like I can taste innatelytaste the strawberry more. Yeah see,
and that's so weird. They bothhave a very good flavor to them,
but they are very different. Shad, Yeah, no, I agree,
(20:30):
and I hear what you're saying.So my number one, I went one
you already mentioned. I went withs'mores. And this a little controversial in
that it's not an original, butI feel like this is where pop Tarts
stopped pretending to be a healthy breakfastand just leaped full across the line into
(20:51):
a snack food. You know,legit tastes like a s'more. There's nothing
good about it. This is whatmy daughter likes to eat for breakfast.
Have to sit there and be like, I think I'm failing as a parent,
because you know, what's what amI doing here? It's like marshmallows
and chocolate for breakfast. But they'reso good, they're they are delicious.
(21:12):
And here's the thing about it.It's it's like when Cereal brands, you
know, Cereal companies, basically said, well, you know what we're just
going to put recy cups in thecereal and you're like, that's not that's
actually not breakfast. We've gone toofar. So both are both our rankings
a lot of overlap there. Ithink we're pretty much on the same page
(21:33):
with our three you know four,I guess, you know, strawberry cherry.
We wouldn't put them together, butthat's kind of where our differences are.
Yeah, so we got you know, we got the fruits, we
got the fruits cup, we representedthe fruits, yeah, and then we
got you know, the cinnamon,and then the s'mores. I mean those
are like more desert y. Yeah, it's got the healthy fruit right because
(21:59):
it popped ore, you're real healthy. And then you got dessert flavors.
The brown sugar said, brown sugar, cinnamon walk the line. It was
like, are we cinnamon toast?I don't know, yeah, you know,
and then s'mores came along and they'relike, whatever, it's chocolate.
It's just chocolate and marshmallows. Sotell us what your favorite flavor is,
(22:21):
you know, leave us a littlefeedback at speaking human dot com. Yeah,
is it Boston cream pie? Wehaven't heard that one mentioned yet.
Is it strawberry cheese Danish. Maybeyou liked the low fat chocolate fudge.
Maybe it's confetti cupcakes. Yeah,it could be hot fudge. Sunday could
be wild licious wild berry. Ooh, what was that one? Wild licious
(22:42):
wild berry? Oh, that doessound good. I think I'd like to
try the chocolate peanut butter. I'lltry anything with peanut butter anyway. So
there's a lot of them out there, I mean, the list is long.
Let us know what your favorite flavorwas or is, and uh,
we'll catch you on the next one. That's it for today's episode. You
can find current and past episodes ofthe podcast on Speaking human dot com.
(23:07):
We'll be back in two weeks withanother episode of Speaking Human. Catch you
then Humans Speaking Human. What ifsomebody gave you what you thought was a
regular pop tart and it had yogurtinside? Would you scream? I would?
(23:33):
I'd scream. I'd be like,oh gross, why'd you give me that
Speeding Human. Today, on SpeakingHuman, we salute six decades of America's
pre eminent toaster pastry by serving upsome notable pieces of pop Tarts marketing and
ranking the most iconic Pop Tarts flavors. Specking Human. Welcome to Speaking Human,
(00:29):
where we simplify the world of marketingfor humans. I'm Shad Calmly and
with me is my co host PatrickJebber. Patrick. As sometimes is the
case, the process of naming thisepisode not a straight line, much like
how pop Tarts has come out withsome flavors over the years that just didn't
(00:50):
hit the spot. Remember root BeerAnyone? We spitball a few different title
ideas that didn't quite stick. Youthink we should share some those titles with
the listeners here right now, pullback the curtain a little bit. We
could? We could. I'll startus off. We heart Tarts. I'm
not opposed to using it. Whatabout still popping tarts? Yeah? I
(01:14):
mean is that a line? Arewe crossing the line there? Pop locking
tarts? That would be cool?Yeah? What about toasting six decades of
tasty Tarts? I like that.I like tasty tarts. She got the
alliteration in there, too, whichis how about this one? This is
kind of leveling up a little bit. You tell me if this one's still
all right? Hot Tarts in theirgolden years. Yeah, yeah, I
(01:37):
think that's okay. Hot Tarts intheir golden years. You know, we're
talking about pop tarts hitting an anniversary. It's kind of in its golden years.
And when they are toasted, theyget like a golden brown. Yeah,
yeah, exactly. I like that. Okay, that's free marketing right
there, free marketing ideas for popTarts and Kelenova Kelenova, not to be
(02:02):
confused with Kellogg's. I didn't knowthat, did you know it? What
Kelenova Kelenova? Yeah. Until Iwas like reading up on pop tarts,
I had never heard of Kelenova.That does not compute with my brain very
well. Yeah, it's weird becauseit feels like a futuristic sci fi novel
about the sun, as you mayor may not have gathered at this point.
(02:24):
We're talking about pop Tarts today.The brand a breakfast snack staple,
especially to us eighties nineties kids whobasically lived off the things. That's how
we got our sustenance, our power, our energy. Celebrating a major milestone
this year. One critical question foryou, Patrick, before we dive into
(02:46):
some marketing talk about pop tarts.How do you prefer your pop tarts?
You like them hot or you likethem cold? I think I definitely like
them hot or at least warm.I like, I don't like them to
be too hot, though, LikeI don't want them to be hot pockets
hot where it's inferno, you know. But but I mean, I think,
(03:07):
if we're being honest, you canreally love pop tarts hotter cold.
Maybe you even like your pop tartsfrozen. I don't know. I can't.
I can't. There's no judgments here, right, No, I mean,
anyway, it's fine. Do youlike them hotter cold or like,
what's what's your preference? I youknow, both are good, but I'm
I'd prefer it warmed up. There'sa there's like a really almost like perfect
(03:31):
temperature. And I don't even usea toaster anymore because we don't we actually
don't have a toaster. But foryears I would just put in a microwave
for like eleven seconds. No,okay, I'm perfect temperature. I've always
toasted. I don't know if I'veever put in a microwave. I'm not
opposed, but yeah, it doesn'tkeep it as Chris, Yeah, yeah,
(03:53):
yeah, And you know I likethat you said it gave us our
power, our sustenance, our power. That's what we ran off of.
Yeah, like tarts and hot pocketsand any you know, other packaged goods.
But that brings us to why we'reeven doing a pop Tarts episode.
Yeah, why are we talking aboutthese things? A lot of people are
(04:15):
gonna say, Oh, you guysare just riding the bandwagon way too late
on the Seinfeld movie. Seinfeld moviethat just came out on Netflix. That's
not true. That's not true.Let's just tell you right here. I'm
gonna say it. Not true.Okay, it's not the reason why we
decide to have this episode. It'sreally because pop Tarts, the brand,
(04:38):
turns sixty. Big birthday. It'sa huge birthday. So to mark the
sixtieth anniversary of the pop Tarts firsthitting the store shelves, we thought we'd
give a little bit of pop Tarthistory and then talk about our favorite flavors
of pop Tarts and also our favoritemarketing that pop Tarts has done over years,
(05:00):
paying homage to a brand that hasbeen. You know, it's not
one hundred, but sixty is notbad. It's been around all our lives
plus some. So it's a popTart extravaganza here today. Let's start with
some history. Tell us where thesethings came from. Patrick So, pop
Tarts were launched in sixty four.That's nineteen sixty four, believe it or
(05:24):
not, in a city not farfrom where this podcast comes from, Cleveland,
Ohio. Can you believe that that'sshocking right into your own backyard?
For all you trivia fans out there, if you didn't know this, there
were only four flavors to originally hitthe market in Cleveland, Strawberry, blueberry,
(05:48):
brown, sugar, cinnamon, andapple. Current, which pop Tarts
notes on their website is I believe, they say, since literally no no
one has ever seen a kurrante karrant. Yeah, we dropped that flavor.
Years later it came back as thefan favorite apple. I think that makes
(06:09):
sense. I don't know what akurant is. What is currant? I
think it's just a spice. I'veseen it, and I've seen it in
other things like pie, A smalldried fruit from a seedless variety of grape
originally grown in the eastern Mediterranean region, so not a seasoning anyway. Getting
off topic, pop Tarts were really, really successful. As you can imagine,
sixty years later, we're ac celebratingthis anniversary that the next year,
(06:33):
nineteen sixty five, pop Tarts wentnationwide. They were so successful they couldn't
keep up with demand. They literallythey had no idea they were going to
be this big fast forward. Todaypop Tarts might be more popular than ever,
with total sales in twenty twenty twoof nearly a billion dollars according to
(06:54):
CNBC report. But you can findit all over the place, even in
their own press releases. So popTarts, big birthday and still going strong
after all these years. It's oneof those brands that you know, as
a kid, we remember back andwe think fondly on this, you know,
the pop Tarts name, and alsojust the food itself, like how
(07:18):
good it is, how delicious weremember it to be. Do you still
eat pop Tarts? I don't,but my daughter does. She'll still eat
them for breakfast, and occasionally I'lllook at the box and be like,
I wish I allowed myself to eatthis stuff. Yeah, me too,
Me too. Like, just evenresearching for the podcast, I was watching
(07:38):
all the market I'm like, man, it's just tapping into my like cerebral
ape brain, and I'm like,I want that. Yeah, it's just
a brand that has that nostalgia isthere for us because they did a lot
of marketing in the eighties and thenineties for these, pounding us on television
because back then that's the way wegot all of our advertising. Yeah,
(07:59):
yeah, magazines and TV. Butit's tough. It's tough to stick around
ten years, twenty years, letalone sixty years and still be relevant.
But these are one of those productsthat's just you almost take for granted that
they're just there. And like Isaid, I ate them. My daughter
eats them now. I mean,if they keep going like this, I
imagine you know, their kids willstill eat them too. You know.
(08:20):
It's like a generational thing where that'sjust like a pop tarts, always delicious,
And I really love it has evolvedin the way that they pitch what
was once a breakfast replacement right nowit's more of like a snack. Don't
just think of it as breakfast,think of it as a snack. We're
so much more. Yeah, ananytime snack, so you kind of hit
(08:41):
on it. We're each gonna talkabout one. We picked out one marketing
effort from the product's sixty year history, obviously a lot to choose from that.
We wanted to kind of call outtalk about a little bit, and
we're each going to do that.Right now. You want to go first,
Patrick, No, I think youshould go first this time. Okay,
(09:01):
let me go first then, Solet me tell you ahead of time.
You know some of the runners upthings I thought about, you're gonna
do runners up. I thought aboutchoosing a nineteen eighty nine commercial that featured
the jingle so Hot They're cool,So cool They're Hot. I don't know
(09:22):
if you remember that, but itwas very nineteen eighty nine. I also
considered the pop Tarts packaging, whichI feel like that box is just very
vibrant and iconic, even going backdecades, it's kind of been like that.
But you know where I landed onwas something super recent. It comes
from twenty twenty three, and thisis pop Tart's first edible mascot. Now
(09:46):
here's how Variety described this effort atthe time it happened. The first ever
Pop Tarts Bowl introduced college football fansto a life size, actually edible Pop
Tarts mascot that was gleefully lowered intoa giant toaster and ravenously devoured by players
(10:07):
Thursday night. Named Strawberry, thepop Tarts mascot immediately went viral on social
media for its sacrificial yet delicious executionafter the college football game ended. Pretty
weird, Yeah, pretty wild.Yeah, got some attention. But you
know, this effort shows a PopTarts still has its spark after all these
(10:30):
years. It's still getting out there, still doing something loud. And you
know, a few notable things aboutthis, as you mentioned, trying to
get into that snack space. Youknow, we're not just breakfast. We're
out there college football. Which betterspot to kind of reach snacking fans showing
people, hey, we're a snack. It's also, you know, they
(10:50):
had this mascot go into a toasterand then they let the winning team eat
it alive, rip it apart.I don't know if a form of cannibalism
has been viewed by this many peoplesince the movie Alive. Yeah, it
was kind of a gross scene,but it's something, you know, it's
bold, it's out there it's kindof in your face, so you appreciate
(11:13):
a brand like pop Tarts, thatcould be like we're old, we're resting
on our laurels, we're cheerios.Yeah no, they're still they're still swinging
for the fences a little bit.And if you want to dig deeper into
a little bit of the subtext here, you've got to brand a product eating
itself alive on the national marketing stage. Is this a dig saying that brand
(11:37):
mascots are so disposable they should beeaten alive after every game, or maybe
it's saying we're devouring ourselves with ourrampant, out of control consumerism. Or
maybe it's just a goofy effort thatlooked kind of weird and gross and got
a lot of attention on social media. Either way, I thought it was
(11:58):
a really interesting move by pop Tarts, you know, staying in that national
consciousness. What'd you think of thisone? That to me is you know,
a fun stunt where you get peopletalking about it. You know,
it had the stage essentially in thatgame, and it was something super bizarre
and that people hadn't seen before.And I think that today it's one way
(12:20):
to go viral to get eyes everywhereon it is to do something like that.
I really liked that effort. I'mglad you pointed it out, because
in the early two thousands they hadthis Crazy Good campaign and they use these
anthropomorphic pastries like Strawberry who goes andjumps in the toaster at the game.
(12:41):
But they were represented sort of likein these doodal forms, you know,
like almost like you were in aschool desk, you know, and drawing,
and they were like little animations andstuff. In the Crazy Good campaign.
They were memorable because of this likesort of sense of humor that was
a little bit morbid. The treatsthemselves fled from people. They were going
(13:03):
to be eaten, right, theywere going to be eaten, and they
were running from the consumers who weregoing to consume them, which led to
the Agents of Crazy Good. TheAgents of Crazy Good sort of makes over
those characters that were doodles at onepoint and makes them into like three D
versions of them, and where theyused to flee from people who were going
(13:26):
to eat them, they go withit and they entice them to be hungry
and want to eat them, whichis like the stunt at the football game,
your strawberry jumping in that toaster.If I look back and actually think
about it a little more, evenlike looking at those like kind of eighties
and nineties commercial pop charts, wasalways kind of like this weird off kilter
a little bit. I mean Ieven look at their logo with the like
(13:50):
big O and the lowercase letters andstuff like that, almost like a childlike
mad scientist a little bit, justkind of like throwing things out there,
but with pretty clear ideas of whatthey were doing. Yeah, according to
Marketing dives right up on this.You know, it's just one of the
latest brands trying to tap into thatyou know, gen Z market because of
(14:11):
their spending power. So why doyou think this product? You know,
we've seen so many products. Wetalk about this all the time, like
brands that go to the graveyard,you know, disappear. We had this,
Ah, we had this for twentyfive years and now it's gone.
Why do you think this product isstuck around for sixty years? What is
it? What's the magic? I'mso glad you asked, Shad, and
(14:33):
I really am channeling my inner Shadtoday because I'm going to give you,
in my opinion, three things,oh beautiful. Number one is convenience.
You know, it solves a problemand makes breakfast, especially on the go,
convenient. Right, It's convenience anda food product. Form Number two
(14:56):
is cost. Right, they've keptthe cost of these so low per package
over the years, making it aneconomic option for breakfast. And that was
the big goal, right, wasto give people on on the go option
that was inexpensive. If you lookat the price. The original price of
a package of pop tarts was thirtynine cents in nineteen sixty three, and
(15:18):
forty five cents in sixty four andfifty six cents in twenty twenty three.
Fifty six cents from the inception thirtynine to fifty six cents. I mean
in sixty years, that's not alot, you know, comparatively, like
when you see a cereal big skyrocketsand you're like, I'm paying eight dollars
for that box of cereal. Socost. And then the third, which
(15:41):
I think is the most important,is cleverness. They've kept the nostalgic aspect
of the product and the original flavor, but also continue to cleverly create new
flavors that entice consumers of all agesto keep coming back. So it's a
clever, clever brand. Convenience,cost, and cleverness, the three c's.
I mean, it's illiterative, it'sin a trio. I love everything
(16:06):
about it. Yeah. You knowwhat I can add to that is,
you know what I was thinking isversatility. You have that with convenience.
You know, breakfast is its mainarea, but it can also be anything.
You know, it's packaged and it'scolorful like cereal, but you can
eat it on the go, youcan have it late at night, cold
or hot. It's junk food asmuch as breakfast food. I mean,
(16:27):
it's it's all purpose in many ways. Right. Yeah, and then something
maybe you didn't entirely hit on,but I think it's baked into the overall.
This is kind of a unicorn productin the sense there's not a lot
else directly competing with it. Youknow, there's toaster. Strudle is probably
like your closest thing in the breakfastspace or something, you know, if
(16:48):
you're talking about actual pastries, butit's kind of its own thing. Yeah,
there's not a lot that's like adirect you know, if you go
and get like a bag of chips, there's two hundred different varieties you go
to, it's cereal. You're competingwith that whole aisle, right, pop
Tarts. I mean there's not anisle of pop tarts. You know.
They kind of like stand alone istheir own thing, and I think that's
(17:08):
really helped them stand out over theyears. And that pop tarts are pop
charts. There's not There's not awhole lot that are like standing next to
them. You could even add thatfourth c. It could be convenience,
cost, cleverness and competition. There'snone. Ah oy. Yeah, it's
killer right there. That's a greatthat's a great list. It's one of
(17:30):
those brands it's stuck around, youknow, and it has to do that
in a lot of ways. Iwon't lie. They're marketing out of all
food products, almost like they havetheir finger on the pulse of that teen
slash maybe young adult mentality mm hm. And they haven't despite you know,
the generations changing, they haven't reallytaken their foot off the gas either.
(17:52):
They've kept it coming out. Theyhaven't like relaxed and just been like,
wow, people know pop Tarts,we don't really need to do anything.
So you got to give them creditfor that. Let's wrap things up here
today with one more thing, maybethe best thing we'll do all day.
We're gonna rank our picks for theall time three most iconic pop Tarts flavors.
(18:15):
So we're each gonna pick three.We're gonna see how we kind of
match up here. What do youhave? As we will go, We'll
go one by you want to goone by one? What do you have
as your number three? I wouldprobably say my number three would be s'mores.
I think the s'mores frosted s'mores poptarts. It's not the most iconic,
but it's delicious and has stuck aroundfor quite a while. Yeah.
(18:37):
Yeah, that one's been around fora good amount of time and it is
delicious. Yeah. My number three, I had strawberry, one of our
original flavors. Maybe should be higherup the best of the fruit flavors.
I think it's just a go toat this point. Yeah, that's my
number two for sure. Okay,yeah, number two, So my number
two. Then I have my favoriteflavor. I probably would have ranked it
(19:02):
higher, but I was like,I'm just so blind biased by how much
I like this, so I'm gonnaput it at number two. It's also
one of the originals, brown sugarcinnamon. Yeah, that's your favorite,
number one favorite. I love it. I'd one and give me a pack
right now. I'll crush him.Or would you tell yourself I can't do
that. I can't have that.That hot cinnamon taste so good. I
(19:27):
always like that as a kid.But I'll tell you I always come back
to this one, the frosted cherry. Oh, the frosted cherry. People
will say, what's the difference rightbetween frosted strawberry and frosted cherry. Don't
they say it taste the same?I mean, come on, Patrick,
and I would tell you, no, they don't taste the same. I
(19:48):
think as much as I like thisfrosted strawberry and reminds me of my youth,
I think the frosted cherry is theone that you can't get sick of.
I'm making that statement here. Youcan eat as many of the frosted
cherry and you won't get tired ofthat flavor. I'm probably one of the
people who kind of group them similarstrawberry and cherry. If I had them
(20:08):
in front of me, I don'teven know which one I would pick.
I mean, i'd be like staringat them, being like, ah,
I don't know, because in someways cherry sounds better to me, but
I feel like I can taste innatelytaste the strawberry more. Yeah see,
and that's so weird. They bothhave a very good flavor to them,
but they are very different. Shad, Yeah, no, I agree,
(20:30):
and I hear what you're saying.So my number one, I went one
you already mentioned. I went withs'mores. And this a little controversial in
that it's not an original, butI feel like this is where pop Tarts
stopped pretending to be a healthy breakfastand just leaped full across the line into
(20:51):
a snack food. You know,legit tastes like a s'more. There's nothing
good about it. This is whatmy daughter likes to eat for breakfast.
Have to sit there and be like, I think I'm failing as a parent,
because you know, what's what amI doing here? It's like marshmallows
and chocolate for breakfast. But they'reso good, they're they are delicious.
(21:12):
And here's the thing about it.It's it's like when Cereal brands, you
know, Cereal companies, basically said, well, you know what we're just
going to put recy cups in thecereal and you're like, that's not that's
actually not breakfast. We've gone toofar. So both are both our rankings
a lot of overlap there. Ithink we're pretty much on the same page
(21:33):
with our three you know four,I guess, you know, strawberry cherry.
We wouldn't put them together, butthat's kind of where our differences are.
Yeah, so we got you know, we got the fruits, we
got the fruits cup, we representedthe fruits, yeah, and then we
got you know, the cinnamon,and then the s'mores. I mean those
are like more desert y. Yeah, it's got the healthy fruit right because
(21:59):
it popped ore, you're real healthy. And then you got dessert flavors.
The brown sugar said, brown sugar, cinnamon walk the line. It was
like, are we cinnamon toast?I don't know, yeah, you know,
and then s'mores came along and they'relike, whatever, it's chocolate.
It's just chocolate and marshmallows. Sotell us what your favorite flavor is,
(22:21):
you know, leave us a littlefeedback at speaking human dot com. Yeah,
is it Boston cream pie? Wehaven't heard that one mentioned yet.
Is it strawberry cheese Danish. Maybeyou liked the low fat chocolate fudge.
Maybe it's confetti cupcakes. Yeah,it could be hot fudge. Sunday could
be wild licious wild berry. Ooh, what was that one? Wild licious
(22:42):
wild berry? Oh, that doessound good. I think I'd like to
try the chocolate peanut butter. I'lltry anything with peanut butter anyway. So
there's a lot of them out there, I mean, the list is long.
Let us know what your favorite flavorwas or is, and uh,
we'll catch you on the next one. That's it for today's episode. You
can find current and past episodes ofthe podcast on Speaking human dot com.
(23:07):
We'll be back in two weeks withanother episode of Speaking Human. Catch you
then Humans Speaking Human. What ifsomebody gave you what you thought was a
regular pop tart and it had yogurtinside? Would you scream? I would?
(23:33):
I'd scream. I'd be like,oh gross, why'd you give me that
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