It’s National Cereal Day – and These are Joe Kelly’s All-Time FavoritesI can eat it all times of the day – and night. On National Cereal Day, I thought I’d run through my list of favorite cereals. My all time #1 favorite used to be Quisp. I think it had 3 times as much cereal as other kids’ cereals! It seemed to disappear for a long time, but I’ve noticed that it’s carried at Shoprite – for about 2 times the price of other cereals! (Thinking back, maybe I just liked it because they always had this mail-offer for a propeller/beenie. My mom never let me order it though. She probably didn’t want me to fly….) By the way Quisp had a sister/rival cereal called Quake. Subscribe to Cat Country 107.3 on Since I had dreams as a kid of growing up to being a professional athlete, I also liked Wheaties of course. Apple Jacks were cool, too. Then there were brands like Frankenberry and Boo Berry (I was never a fan of Count Chocula). Lucky Charms were swell – and they still are today.
My all time favorites also include Cap’n Crunch, King Vitamin, and Freakies! So, there are some of mine. In the section below, tell me about some of yours! Category: Cat Country Morning Show Best of Cat Country A Thousand Horses, ‘Preachin’ to the Choir’ [Listen] Keith Urban: Cutting School Music Programs Is ‘Shocking’ and ‘Scary’ Watch Keith Urban’s Acoustic Cover of Miranda Lambert’s ‘Vice’ Friday Will Be Country Fun Day in Atlantic City With FGL And More Best of the WebWhen you hear the name “Product 19,” you’ll either flash on an experimental invention from some corporate R&D department, or, if you’re one of its fans, you might think of the health cereal, rare in the aisles of American supermarkets yet loved all the same. But earlier this month, Kellogg’s announced that it had officially discontinued the cereal. While most people these days seemed to barely know of its existence, Product 19 died—a slow, oaty, fade to black, leaving devoted fans desperate.
“PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t discontinue this cereal,” one fan wrote on Kellogg’s community boards a few months ago. “I LOVE LOVE LOVE this cereal!” What was Product 19, though? For nearly 50 years, it was simply an answer to a business problem, first released in 1967 as Kellogg’s answer to General Mills’ Total, which had hit the market six years prior. As the current slogan still contends, Total aimed to provide 100% of the daily amounts of nutrients like vitamin E, calcium, iron, and more. Kellogg’s needed something to compete with this healthy new blockbuster, so they began attempting to develop a vitamin cereal of their own, eventually settling on Product 19. The name, immediately, was a bit curious, and its origins, perhaps fittingly, remain apocryphal. According to one story, it was so named because the end product was the 19th iteration of the cereal they were developing. Others say it was simply the 19th product Kellogg’s developed that year.
Either way, Product 19 stuck, a workmanlike name that echoed what the cereal promised to do: provide a base of nutrition, nothing more or less. The cereal was made up of flakes made from a combination of lightly sweetened corn, wheat, oats, and rice, and promoted itself as providing the full daily amounts of “Multivitamins and Iron.” On the more modern boxes, this would be specified as, “Vitamin E, Folic Acid, Iron, and Zinc.” The original box was so covered in charts and blocks of text, it truly looked more like some experimental substance than a breakfast cereal. Product 19 sold itself as a cereal for health-minded adults and older people, barking about how the cereal would make you feel young again. , the cereal’s original slogan was, “Instant Nutrition - New cereal food created especially for working mothers, otherwise busy mothers and everybody in a hurry.” However the focus of their marketing quickly shifted. In the early 1970s, Product 19 used former Heisman trophy winner, Tom “Old 98” Harmon, then in his 50s, as its spokesman in a series of television commercials.
He presented the cereal as a part of the wellness routine he used to stay active. At the same time, Total was rolling out its now iconic commercials featuring a comparison of how many bowls of a competing cereal it would take to get the same vitamins. And whether it was due to marketing or flavor, Product 19 never gained the household name recognition of competitors like Total, or even Special K, but the cereal did manage to hold on to a devoted fan base. Updating its brand throughout the years to sell itself to younger consumers (the most modern package featured the image of someone doing yoga), the cereal maintained a presence on store shelves through the 2000s, sticking with its simple red and white motif and industrial name. But as sales of Product 19 began to slump, it began slowly disappearing from stores. In a thread from 2014 on Kellogg’s official product forums, a Product 19 fanatic pleaded that the cereal not be taken from shelves, but an official rep responded that Product 19 had gone into limited distribution.
Facebook groups like “Bring Back Kellogg’s Product 19” began popping up around the same time, with people posting images of the final remaining boxes of the cereal they found on store shelves. Without much action on social media in the two years since Product 19 went into decline, Kellogg’s released a statement officially declaring that Product 19 had been discontinued. The statement reads in part, “We are sorry to announce that Kellogg’s Product 19 cereal has been discontinued. Unfortunately, sales of this cereal were not strong enough to support continued production, so we had to make the difficult decision to discontinue it.” Despite a nearly 50 year history as an underdog of the healthy cereal market, Product 19 has gone the way of so many other beloved breakfasts, passing into the Great Lunchtime. But to its diehard fans, no substitution will ever taste the same.« Coffee Shop Review at Green Man Review |Coffee Shop Shows Up; TAD in Analog » Meet Chester, the mascot for the "ChipMates" line of cookie cereal.
Here you can see him doing his thing, opening his arms wide in celebration of the cereal brand which he is exhorting you to enjoy in all its flavorful, vitamin-enriched kidtastic goodness. He is cute and non-threatening, particularly for one who is clearly meant -- by attire and accoutrement -- to be a pirate. As required by the National Code of Cereal Mascots, his eyes are wide and unlidded, his eyebrows arched with pleasure and his mouth ever so slack, showing just a hint of tongue, as if to imply the joy of consuming the cereal is so great that one's brain simply cannot ask one's jaws to clamp down and risk not tasting the powdery, particulate fragments that hover in the air above the bowl, jostled up after the cereal has tumbled the distance from the box to the bowl's concave surface. He is everything a cereal mascot is meant to be. What do we really know of Chester? What is his story? What are his motivations for presenting this bowl of cereal to us? To which of the two great cereal mascot archetypes does he belong?
Is he a Taster, one of the lucky mascots, like Tony the Tiger or Toucan Sam, who gets to enjoy the product he is so assiduously pitching? Or is he a Chaser, one of those poor bastards like the Trix Rabbit, doomed to the Sisyphean task of promoting a cereal he himself is never once allowed to enjoy? The pirate garb suggests he is a Chaser; after all, pirates spend their time chasing booty, which they may or may not ever get. But on the other hand, perhaps this pirate already has his treasure -- these dun, chocolate-spotted discs of corn and oats -- in which case, like Lucky the Leprechaun, he would be tasked with keeping said treasure from cute but frighteningly rapacious children who chase him about trying to get it for their own. Which would put him solidly in the Taster camp. Fact is, Chester could swing either way. And we can't know. And that is because Chester is the mascot not for a national brand of cereal, but for a store brand (or, those in the industry call it, a "private label" brand), made for the Krogers supermarket chain here in America's heartland.
As a mascot for a private label brand, Chester finds himself in an uncomfortable position. His job performance is hampered, not because of his lack of skill in his job, but by the simple mechanics of private label distribution. None of his efforts, for example, will ever get ChipMates into a Food Lion or a Safeway. They have their own private label cookie cereals, possibly with their own mascots -- an excitable giraffe, perhaps, or maybe a baker out of his mind with cookie-based rapture. But more than that, as a store brand mascot, Chester is denied the vehicle that would allow his character its narrative: The commercial. Everything we know of all the major cereal mascots comes in 30-second animated snippets; it's how we know Tony the Tiger is an excellent lifestyle coach, or that Snap, Crackle and Pop have virtuoso comic timing, or that the poor Trix Rabbit is in desperate and immediate need of therapy. We will never have these brief windows into Chester's soul; store brands aren't given commercials of their own.
At best, they get a picture in an advertising circular or a second or two on a local TV ad, as the camera pans across a collection of private label items and some droning announcer declares the remarkable savings they afford. Two seconds of being panned across is not enough time to develop a coherent backstory. All Chester gets is the cereal box, and a single, ambiguous pose. And, of course, he's lucky to get even that. Some mascots don't even get a box; think back on the humiliation visited upon Schnoz the Shark or Mane Man as they tried to entice consumers to their cereal in flimsy plastic bags, shelved, as they always were, on the bottom shelf of the cereal aisle. Think also on the extremely high rate of unemployment among cereal mascots. When was the last time Baron Von RedBerry got work? Or Twinkles the Elephant? Or Dandy, Handy 'N Candy? The dirty secret about being a cereal mascot is that if it doesn't work out -- if your cereal flops or management decides to make a mascot change -- you're through.
You can't get work again. No other cereal will hire you. The best you can hope for is that somewhere along the way some advertising whiz kid decides to run a nostalgia campaign, and then you get trotted out again, gamely smiling for the camera and pathetically grateful that the income will help you get your meds (cereal mascots are ironically susceptible to several diseases related to vitamin deficiencies). Say what you will about the ignominy of being a store brand cereal mascot, but at least it's steady work. Creating new mascots for a private label brand is money the grocery store companies simply aren't going to pay. Be that as it may, spare a moment for the existential plight of Chester Chipmate, a mascot without voice or history or personal motivation, an enigma wrapped in a mystery, coated in sugar and fortified with minerals. Who knows what wisdom he might impart to us if he had just one 30-second animated commercial? An exclamation that his wares are chiptastic? A promise that his cereal is good to the last crumb?
