No, we don't miss them, but it's fun to read about these failed food products. What were they thinking?
1. The Chicken Dinner Candy Bar
Fortunately for gastrointestinal tracts worldwide, this candy bar didn't actually include chicken in its list of ingredients. And equally lucky for Sperry Candy Co., which introduced the "treat" in the 1920s, consumers actually figured this one out on their own. The company introduced the chocolate-and-peanut butter bar right before the onset of the Depression, hoping the name would give consumers the feeling they were about to have a big home-cooked meal at Grandma's house—hence the juicy roast chicken on the advertisements. Strangely, the gimmick worked, even well after the economy recovered, and Chicken Dinner candy bars were available until the 1960s. Does this mean it qualifies as a true marketplace "flop"? No. Did we put it on the list anyway because it sounds like it really should have been? Absolutely.
2. Cereal Mates
Sometimes, new products fail because they're simply bad ideas (ahem, New Coke). Other times, it's because they're just impossible to market. Such was the case for Cereal Mates. Beating the dead horse of über-convenient breakfast foods, Kellogg's introduced Cereal Mates in 1997. The idea was simple: a small box of cereal, a container of specially packaged milk (no refrigeration required!), and a plastic spoon. It was the perfect A.M. answer for the person on the go ...who enjoys warm milk on cereal. Trying to patch up one mistake with another, Kellogg's then moved the product to the dairy section, where no sane person looks for cereal. On top of all that was the price. At about $1.50 for only four ounces of the stuff, Cereal Mates was deemed too expensive for most consumers. After two years, Kellogg's pulled it from the shelves.
3. Flower-Flavored PEZ®
No, that's not a typo. Although it would be equally disgusting, we're talking about flower, not flour. Introduced in the late 1960s, flower-flavored PEZ was designed to appeal to the hippie generation—complete with a groovy, psychedelic dispenser. But even in the decade of free love, no love could be found for the flavor power of flower. Floral scents make for great perfume, but nobody eats perfume, and apparently, there's a reason why. The flower version flopped, and became the next addition to PEZ's long and disturbing list of flavor failures. Since its introduction in 1927, the company has also sold coffee, licorice, eucalyptus, menthol, and cinnamon flavors.
4. "I Hate Peas!"
For as long as children have been shoving Brussels sprouts under mashed potatoes and slipping green beans to the dog, parents have been hunting desperately for a way to end the vegetable discrimination. Finally, in the 1970s, American Kitchen Foods, Inc. came to the rescue (or at least tried) with the release of "I Hate Peas!" Since kids love French fries so much, the company decided that disguising peas in a fry-shaped form was a sure-fire way to trick tots into getting their vitamins. Not a chance. Children all over America saw through the ruse. After all, a pea is a pea is a pea, and the name of the product was more than apropos, no matter what it looked like. There were other thinly disguised vegetables in the company's "I Hate" line, but kids hated those, too.
5. Reddi-Bacon
Any company smart enough to bless mankind with sprayable whipped cream—the sort that promotes direct-to-mouth feeding—has got to know a thing or two about immediate gratification. But sadly, the makers of Reddi-wip® were unable to meld their keen understanding of human laziness with one of processed meat. They figured, if you're cooking breakfast in the morning and you've got a hankering for bacon, why dirty up a pan you'll only have to clean later? The solution: foil-wrapped Reddi-Bacon you could pop into your toaster for piping-hot pork in minutes.
While it seemed perfect for the busy 1970s household, the absorbent pad designed to soak up the dripping grease tended to leak, creating not only a fire hazard, but also a messy (if not totally ruined) toaster. Ultimately, the product lasted about as long as it took to cook; the company scrapped it before it went to market nationwide.
6. Coffee-Flavored Jell-O®
(Image credit: Travels With Mary & Elaine)
In 1918, the makers of Jell-O introduced a new flavor: coffee. Its release was ostensibly based on the logic that, since lots of people like to drink coffee with dessert, they'd be game for combining the two after-dinner treats. Not the case. The company soon realized if anyone wants dessert coffee, they're going to have a cup of it. In fact, if anyone wants coffee at all, they're going to have a cup of it. Not surprisingly, this realization came about the time they yanked the product off the shelves. Coffee wasn't Jell-O's only misstep: Cola-flavored Jell-O was sold for about a year starting in 1942, and for a brief while, the clear, wiggly dessert was sold in celery and chocolate flavors, too.
7. Heublein's Wine & Dine
In the mid-1970s, Heublein introduced Wine & Dine, an upscale, easy-to-make dinner that included a small bottle of vino. How refined. How decadent. How confusing. Consumers knew Heublein for their liquor and wines, so how were they supposed to know the wine included in Wine & Dine was an ingredient for the pasta sauce? Hasty consumers who didn't read the directions closely ended up pouring the contents of the bottle into a nice glass and getting a less-than-pleasant mouthful of salted wine.
8. Funky Fries
In 2002, hoping to follow the success of Heinz's new "kiddie" ketchup versions (in green and purple), Ore-Ida introduced Funky Fries: chocolate-flavored, cinnamon-flavored, and blue-colored French fries. An awful lot of money was sunk into the product, but after a year of marketing, consumers still found the idea funky—in the bad way. Funky Fries were pulled off the shelves in 2003, and images of blue fries with green ketchup were once again relegated to the world of Warhol-esque pop art.
9. Pepsi A.M.
Creating a super-caffeinated soda worked well for the makers of Red Bull, but not for the folks at Pepsi. With 25 percent more caffeine than a cup of Joe, PepsiCo introduced the cola-flavored product in 1989, only to discover that most people just couldn't bring themselves to drink soda with their cornflakes. For those who wanted a Pepsi in the morning, regular Pepsi did just fine, thankyouverymuch. Pepsi A.M., like the coffee-flavored Pepsi Kona before it, was scrapped after just a few months.
10. Gerber Singles
At some point in time, almost every adult has tasted baby food and discovered that the stuff isn't half bad. But that doesn't mean people want to make a meal out of it. For some reason, Gerber had to learn that lesson the hard way. In 1974, the company released Gerber Singles, small servings of food meant for single adults, packaged in jars that were almost identical to those used for baby food. It didn't take long for Gerber execs to figure out that most consumers, unless they were less than a year old, couldn't get used to eating a pureed meal out of a jar—particularly one depressingly labeled "Singles." Baby food for grown-ups was pulled from the marketplace shortly after its birth.
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This article by Terri Schlichenmeyer is reprinted with permission from the March/April 2005 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss' entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
Comments (6)
Oh and how about presliced peanut butter? I've actually seen that one in the store in the 90s, very briefly...
http://news.limauais.com/walter-cronkite-dies-cause-of-cerebral-vascular-disease/
I heard on the radio and one of the hosts said that he wondered what he died of... "Old age" isnt good enough anymore?
I specifically remember my Grandad insisting we all shut our mouths when the CBS News came on, and Cronkite told us how it was. He was like the Sinatra/Brando of the news.
"don't look at me, Walt!!"
--
i met Mr. Cronkite once, and he was as nice as he seemed to be on television.
Cronkite was a journalist of the highest order who presided over both triumph and tragedy in equal parts. And more than anything sought the truth. He is a more accomplished and greater man than you will ever even see...and twenty times the man you could hope to become.
My grandpop did the same thing, and after that we watched Unsolved Mysteries for a couple of hours. This year has been so terrible. Now that the "greats" are all passing it really may be the time to turn off the radio. Godspeed, Walt.
$10 sez andy rooney is next LOL
What made his type of journalism different from what we are used to today would be to look at the ratio of important stories to fluff and filler. And that would put 21st century journalism at a disadvantage, because newscasts today have to fill 24 hours a day and several channels. In Cronkite's era of an hour of news per day max, there wasn't room for anything that wasn't important. In many ways, that made following the news easier for the viewer. But networks could expand coverage when needed, for big events like a political assassination or war or a moon landing. And those are the things we remember years later.
It's pretty funny the lengths trolls will go to.
When the US lost the Vietnam war, communist governments flourished in SE Asia and resulted in the murder of over one million civilians.
I feel that Cronkite's deceptive broadcasts played a huge part in allowing this to happen and sour the US public's desire to stop the killing fields of Cambodia.
PS please don't call me a troll for presenting a different opinion.
Otherwise, you would just be a flat-earth, truth-is-out-there, moon-landing-was-faked, no-plane-flew-into-the-Pentagon conspiracy nut.
He used the nightly news cast as his very own bully pulpit, telling America what he wanted them to hear and, consequently, getting them to believe what he wanted them to believe. That is not fine.
Cronkite's history was not stellar in the truth and accuracy department.
He didn't do America, or her servicemen, any favors by blatantly lying and editorializing about events in Vietnam. Conversely, Cronkite soured American public opinion while simultaneously encouraging the enemy to fight on a little longer. His words may not have been direct encouragement, but the result was the same.
It's amusing to me to see Neatorama commenters get themselves all lathered up over history and politics, subjects of which the knowledge here is obviously very limited.
People who know history and have a firm anchor in reality wouldn't be so quick to make public spectacles of themselves.
Did WC tell the truth to the American people regarding Tet?
Perhaps it will be released soon.
What Cronkite basically told his audience was just that. I believe the word was "stalemate." And he painted a grim portrait of the war to come, stimulating President Johnson to not seek re-election. I am clueless as to any lies that were told, and what damage was done.
"We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. They may be right, that Hanoi's winter-spring offensive has been forced by the Communist realization that they could not win the longer war of attrition, and that the Communists hope that any success in the offensive will improve their position for eventual negotiations. It would improve their position, and it would also require our realization, that we should have had all along, that any negotiations must be that -- negotiations, not the dictation of peace terms. For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer's almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.
To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could"