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Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

Pop Tarts are so awful these days. Not only have they relentlessly cut the filling and icing, you can visibly see the progress as time goes on. Kellogg, I don't buy pop tarts for the crust!

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I wish I had some frozen in time from the 80s/90s. How much did they really get worse vs how much are my kid rose tinted glasses clouding my judgement?

Your comment reminded of the time 10+ years ago when avid Cadbury Egg enthusiast B.J. Novak was on Conan and talked about how he thought Cadbury Eggs were shrinking and proved it by bringing out a Cadbury Cream egg he had around his house from years prior.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlXLCrzpToo

The biggest reason why Cadbury Eggs suck in the US is because the brand Cadbury is owned by Hersey and they make terrible chocolate. Get some in the UK the next time you're there.

(Yes, the eggs have shrunk)

Hate to break it to you, but since 2010 Cadbury UK has been owned by Mondelez International. The quality of Cadbury in Europe is declining, IMHO. (I never liked US Cadbury)

There is still a massive difference between the chocolates. (Hersey vs now Mondelez) Herseys tastes like wax that's gone bad.

There's a specific reason for that. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hersheys-chocolate-tastes-lik...

My favorite part was the gaslighting done by Cadbury. “It hasn’t gotten smaller, you’ve gotten bigger”

Planet Money did a good episode on shrinkflation: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/07/06/1012409112/bew...

Cancerous MBAs extracting as much profit as possible out of everything. They've perfected the art of re-examining everything and trimming as much fat as their customers can tolerate...and then they do it again.

If you're reading this as an Ivy League business school student, I hope you outlive your kids.

Exactly. I hate the fact that products get cheaper every year and businesses have to compete for me as a customer.

Damn you MBAs!!! <shakes fist at air>

Lol, they are not getting cheaper. For decades, products are getting made with increasingly shittier parts. Big box items like fridges/washers/etc are nowhere near as reliable as our grandparent's were. They break just outside of manufacturer warranties. Selling a washer that lasts for years and years doesn't help YoY growth. Prices stay the same all the while they bilk you right under your nose (https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180510-the-food-you-b...).

But if you want to go ahead and be a ignorant lemming like these companies want you to be, by all means do so; It doesn't change reality.

Well, my grandparents couldn't afford neither a fridge nor a washing machine at all and now you can get one with a week of minimum wage work. The problem is that as a consumer I can't distinguish between a washing machine that is expensive because it's built to last and a washing machine that's expensive because somebody liked a higher profit margin, so the market naturally converges to things that last exactly as long as they have to to avoid lawsuits.

In Japan, Country Ma’am cookies are infamous for magically getting smaller over the years. Shrinkflation is a real thing.

/edit to include cookie name

Pic: https://twitter.com/cicada3301_kig/status/131419416269930905...

Now you made me curious

https://www.reddit.com/r/shrinkflation

I want the specific name of the cookie and name of the country

A college roommate said that his family received a box of Pop Tarts as part of a marketing test before they went on the market. After the first breakfast, they never ate more. That would have been about the time they came out, maybe 1965.

I did eat them, but at an age that I'd eat pretty much anything.

I have to imagine there has been reformulations on many items since the 80s based on cultural trends and food science.

We went through the "Low Fat" period where "fat" was removed and replaced with sugar. Probably less animal fats and more palm oil along the way or fried in peanut oil, etc...

There is a lot of foods that I had as a kid that I don't consume now nor even offer my kids.

I have had them once or twice a year for the last 10 years as a junk food treat on wilderness backpacking trips. Other than the availability of certain flavors I haven’t noticed any change at all since I was a kid.

It must be a recent thing. A little over 3 years ago I had to eat a poptart dinner in a hotel while prepping for a demo. They were exactly what I remembered.

Why have facts when you can use feelings? /s

this is the same recipe as 20 years ago. I actually used to work on redesigning the formulation and process for strawberry fillings. Nothing changed except your taste buds.

Then what was there to redesign?

Wild guess: the formulation and process for strawberry fillings.

20 years ago I imagine...

I'm talking about the amount of icing and filing rather than the taste of it. As a kid I remember there being much more icing coverage (less empty crust on the edges) and I remember being able to squeeze out a lot more filling than I can today.

Older pop-tarts had mostly rectangular icing but now one edge has a semi-circle shape. Coincidentally, this is the side they show cut off on the front of the box to show the filling.

Took a few minutes to do some image searching, and the ingredients (listed in order of prevalence) have changed. As have several nutritional values. Many are the same, but many are not.

the (person you replied to) indicated in their view that the dimension (thickness) has changed not the recipe

Changing the ratio of filling/ crust/ icing would change the taste

> I actually used to work on redesigning the formulation and process for strawberry fillings. Nothing changed except your taste buds.

Nothing changed, but you redesigned the formulation? What does that mean?

The recipe may be the same, but is the icing coverage and filling volume the same?

> Kellogg, I don't buy pop tarts for the crust!

That's really funny because I do. I hate the sugary "frosting" crap so I only buy the unfrosted ones (for myself, that is). But honestly, the crust is the best part of the whole experience.

OTOH, I'd prefer pop-tarts if they were just frosting and crust with no filling at all. The one end where the frosting runs almost to the edge (I assume as an artifact of how it's applied) so you get just crust and frosting, is the best part of a pop tart.

You weirdo, I bet your prefer whipped cream to actual frosting on cakes! /s

Now, them's fightin' words. Nothing beats a good buttercream.

I had the same thought and was just looking at making these the other day:

https://www.punchfork.com/recipe/Paleo-Strawberry-Homemade-P...

Skip the paleo baloney (that crust ain't holding up) and just use a standard flour and butter shortcrust recipe. Super easy & fun to make. Chuck what you don't eat in the freezer for next month.

There's a lot of food that has evolved to taste "like a thing" but man I swear it has evolved into it's own thing. That is just referencing something "like another food".

Yeah, lots of things don't really taste like the thing they're "supposed" to taste like. Like, I find most grape stuff approximates the taste of concord grapes... but how many people think of concords when they think of grapes?

Grenadine tastes more like cherry flavoring than pomegranates. Heck, cherry flavoring doesn't taste much like cherries either.

Wait, grenadine is supposed to be pomegranate flavored? I've been using it to make "cherry cokes" for decades... I prefer that flavor to the "real" cherry coke one.

"Grenade" is French for pomegranate. The problem is the most common brand "Rose's" is basically a cherry-flavored corn-syrup. Which, if that's what you want, is fine... but it's a far cry from proper grenadine.

Cocktail cherries are another cocktail ingredient with a similar insane drift from their origins - good quality Luxardos taste amazing and fruity and come packed in this deep purple fruity maraschino syrup, while supermarket Maraschino Cherries taste... well... awful.

source: I watched too many Youtube "How To Drink" videos on the history of cocktails at the start of the pandemic and ended up picking up a new hobby.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTF7QkIkns8

Thanks for the link. Now I need to find some pomegranate juice so that I can make my own!

Just a warning: I tried following his recipe and it came out too dark. Still tastes fine, but it turns all my cocktails copper brown which isn't appetizing. So I just buy higher-end stuff now - still has the crisp "Red Dye 40" color but tastes like real fruit.

IMHO ... Cinnamon Pop Tarts are still bad ass

Mmm...back in the early 80's, frosted brown sugar cinnamon Pop Tarts were my usual breakfast. I tried ~all the other flavors - and decided that those generally tasted worse, and had (at best, after reading the labels) no better nutrition.

(Edit: 's/that was/frosted brown sugar cinnamon Pop Tarts were/' - to spell out just how "these are not health food" obvious the label on 'em is.)

This is why I believe the real inflation is higher than the official. When the price remains the same but the quality degrades it's inflation.

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