Why Did Toys Disappear From Cereal Boxes?

Honey Comb Monster Mitts. Urkel for President campaign buttons. Sugar Smacks Star Trek badges. If you ate cereal between the 1950s and 1990s, you were likely to encounter a cereal box prize—an inexpensive trinket lurking inside the bag that may have made the difference between a kid choosing Fruit Loops over Lucky Charms.

Browse the cereal aisle today, though, and you won’t find much in the way of in-box toy incentives. So what happened?

1. The Origin of Cereal Box Toys
2. Why Cereal Box Toys Disappeared

The Origin of Cereal Box Toys

Dry breakfast cereal has always been marketing-driven. In the 1930s, Mickey Mouse was recruited to endorse Post products; Cap’n Crunch was created to appeal to kids who hated soggy cereal. But prizes weren’t always relegated to children. In 1905, Quaker Oats awarded consumers free bowls of fine China in exchange for box tokens.

Obviously, Quaker wasn’t stuffing fragile dinnerware into boxes of oatmeal: You had to send away for the bowls. But before long, prizes were included in the package itself. In the 1930s, General Mills began enticing kids with paper airplanes and trading cards packed inside cereal boxes. In the 1940s, Army buttons could be dug out of Pep cereal. In the 1950s, Kellogg’s began inserting tiny submarines and scuba-diving frogmen into their products. (The submarines could be filled with baking soda that allowed them to plunge and resurface in bathwater.)

Some companies used the limitations of the giveaways to get creative. In 1955, Quaker Puffed Rice offered a deed that entitled the consumer to a 1-inch plot of land in the Yukon; Nabisco’s Wheat Honeys promised a launching plastic rocket; Alpha Bits included terrariums where kids could grow basil.

As plastic injection molding made toymaking easier, companies began outsourcing creative toy ideas to marketing companies, who would then try to bid for cereal contracts. The toys had to meet exacting specifications for size and weight. The item couldn’t have any loose parts, because a tiny figure’s broken arm or head could become a choking hazard. (That problem was never fully resolved: In 1988, Kellogg’s recalled 30 million tiny flutes and binoculars that were included in boxes of Corn Pops and Rice Krispies that could break into smaller, airway-obstructing pieces.)

Some toys didn’t take much brainstorming: They were marketing tie-ins. A new Star Wars movie could mean a lightsaber spoon stuffed into boxes of Apple Jacks; others were mascot-driven, with Tony the Tiger license plates awaiting kids in boxes of Frosted Flakes.

Come the 2000s, though, cereal toys seemed to be growing scarce.

Why Cereal Box Toys Disappeared

Cereal companies never made any formal announcements about their shifting marketing strategies. Still, it’s easy enough to identify some contributing factors to the decline in cereal toys.

The most significant change to the industry was the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, a voluntary pledge announced in 2005 that curbs advertising less-nutritious food to kids. Cereal makers like Post, General Mills, and Kellogg’s (under the company name Kellanova) are all participants. Since toys are certainly going to catch a kid’s eye, there may have been some reluctance to stuff them into sugary cereals. Instead, companies began including pedometers in boxes to encourage physical activity.

A more health-conscious market wasn’t the only issue. Environmental concerns were also in play, with companies recognizing that the mass production of plastic items likely to be discarded isn’t exactly a public relations win.

Cereal incentives still exist. Tiny toy mascots dubbed Bowl Buddies were included in Kellogg’s boxes in 2021. Other boxes feature QR codes so consumers can play games online. But the days of garnering a deed to a 1-inch plot of land in the Yukon or firing off a plastic rocket over the breakfast table are likely over.

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