General Mills is re-releasing their monster cereals again for the Halloween season. But not just the usual Count Chocula, Franken Berry, and Boo Berry; Fruit Brute[sup]*[/sup] and Fruity Yummy Mummy are joining them on the shelves his year. Yes, all five monster cereals are available together for the first time ever.
I became aware of this momentous occasion a few weeks ago when I saw the special display at my local grocery store. (Either they put them out too early and moved them back to the stockroom, or they flew off the shelves. I haven’t seen any of them since.) I even bought a box of Frute Brute. I’d never had it before. My mom was very anti-sugary-cereal when I was a kid, and FB was discontinued in 1984.
Which got me wondering, how faithful a recreation is the Frute Brute of today to it’s original from decades past? Is there anybody around who’d even know? Where have they been keeping the recipe all this time? I just can’t believe that someone thought “hmm, better remember how to make this stuff so in 29 years we can have it back in the stores for a month.”
What do companies do with their intellectual property when it becomes obsolete, and how many trade secrets are there that have been lost in the mists of the past?
Hmm, should this have been the MMP?
Now “Frute Brute”, presumably because there’s no actual fruit in it.
I would assume they kept the recipe somewhere, archiving it as part of the company history. However, the new version probably won’t follow the same recipe in any case: they would adjust it to current tastes.
I read where the recipe to Liederkranz cheese has been lost by Borden (who had it last). It’s not that they didn’t know the ingredients, but the flavor of the cheese was due to the bacteria used to make it (when the manufacturer built a new plant, the cheese didn’t taste any good until the went back to the old facility, scraped the bacteria off the wall, and added it to the mix). Since the facility is closed, there is no way to know what bacteria gave it the flavor (though people have tried to recreate it, supposedly using the original cultures).
In general, there are many answers. Some keep the information in archives; sometimes the archives are thrown out.
I wonder how much effort companies put into that sort of thing, and whether there are some interesting secrets squirreled away that we’ll never know about. Is there any provision for a company to go out of business and donate their papers to a library, like famous people sometimes do, for research or just idle curiosity?
The marshmallows were a little crunchy, but not 29 years crunchy. And they did design new boxes for all of them (Target gets the full nostalgia trip with the original boxes); Frute Brute looks like Wolowitz from The Big Bang Theory.
Not a lot of effort, but usually there are company archives. These are not definitive, since it’s often hit or miss as to what gets archived.
When the company goes out of business, the archives are an asset and can be sold, but it’s not likely they can be donated. Usually a company goes into bankruptcy and giving away any asset under bankruptcy is a no-no.
I haven’t had any this year, but unless my memory is very faulty indeed, the monster cereals of recent years are formulated differently from the monster cereals of my childhood. For one thing, the marshmallows used to be marshmallow-shaped; now, they’re monster shaped. For another thing, they’ve redesigned the non-marshmallow bits so that they don’t get soggy in milk, presumably by making them out of plastic.
Also, if you google images of ‘fruit brute’ google automatically shows ‘yummy’ mummy’ images as well, which include a topless woman in some costume or something. I scrolled away as quickly as I could; I’m at work.
I misunderstood the thread title, and considered the strange cultural twists that began at Mary Shelley’s pen near Geneva and ended at a cereal extruder in Minneapolis.
I’m reminded of an article I read, some years ago, about Steve Sansweet (at that point just a Star Wars uberfan; he now works for Lucasfilm). He talked about a gift that someone had given him – an unopened box of Boo-Berry (from the late 1970s, I’d guess), in which the “prize” was a Star Wars sticker. Sansweet opened the box, to find that the passage of 20-odd years had caused the cereal to decompose into a blue goop that filled the bottom third of the inner bag.
In other words, I, too, highly doubt that the boxes currently at Target are “vintage”. Easy ways to check that would be the “best before date” printed on the box, as well as any trademark info on the box (or if there’s a link to a General Mills website on the box).