Golden Crisp
Product type | Breakfast cereal |
---|---|
Owner | Post Holdings |
Produced by | Post Consumer Brands |
Country | U.S. |
Introduced | 1948 | (as "Happy Jax")
Related brands | Sugar Crisp (Canada) Honey Smacks |
Website | www |
Golden Crisp, also known as Sugar Crisp in Canada, is a brand of
History
At the 1904 World Fair, the Quaker Oats Company made a candy-coated puffed cereal, a wheat-based product similar to Cracker Jack's candy-coated popcorn. The product concept was re-introduced unsuccessfully in 1939 by another business as Ranger Joe, the first pre-sweetened, candy-coated breakfast cereal. Post Foods introduced their own version in 1948. The Post version was originally called "Happy Jax", and was renamed to "Sugar Crisp" the next year.[2]
Sugar Crisp debuted with what The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets would later call "an astonishing sugar content of 51 percent" (in weight), which remained the second highest in the US market when competitor Kellogg's introduced its Sugar Smacks (later renamed Honey Smacks) in the early 1950s which consisted of 55% sugar.[3] The two cereals are both sweetened puffed wheat.
In 1967, the name was changed to "Super Sugar Crisp", and in 1985, it was changed again to "Super Golden Crisp".[4] Finally, it was changed to "Golden Crisp" (during a time when many cereals dropped the word "Sugar" from their names) in the American market.
In the early 1970s, there was a short-lived variation on the original Sugar Crisp, called "Super Orange Crisp", which had orange-flavored O's in it.[5]
As of 2021, the product is still sold as Sugar Crisp in Canada, with ads displaying the Sugar Bear mascot and the phrase "Can't get enough of that Sugar Crisp."[6]
Marketing
Advertisements in the 1950s positioned this
Later television advertisements feature one mascot, an
The focus of advertising shifted from targeting children to including parents, by downplaying the sweet taste (and associated sugar content).
Concerns over sugar content
In 1975, Super Orange Crisp was found to contain almost 71 percent sugar by dentist Ira Shannon. Shannon, who became tired of seeing so many cavities in his patients' mouths, bought hundreds of different kinds of sugary breakfast cereals and analyzed the contents of each in a lab.[4]
In a 2008 comparison of the nutritional value of 27 cereals, U.S. magazine
See also
References
- ^ The Birth of Frosted Flakes. Neatorama, March 11, 2013
- ^ ISBN 9780865477568.
- ISBN 978-0-19-931362-4.
- ^ ISBN 978-0812982190
- ^ Super Orange Crisp, a short-lived spin-off cereal.
- ^ "Sugar Crisp Cereal". Post Consumer Brands Canada. Retrieved 2021-03-07.
- ^ a b Some Breakfast Cereals Marketed to Kids Are More Than 50 Percent Sugar consumerreports.org, October 1, 2008