Why does oatmeal come in cardboard cylinders, whereas other grain cereals come in boxes?

[filmore]

We buy steel cut Irish oatmeal. It looks like little grains of rice cut in half. It comes in a box and pours easily into a measuring cup. However, we prefer to be able to dip the cup into the oats and pull out what we need. It’s too clumsy to do this from the box, so we transfer the boxed oats to a larger container. The container we use? An old Quaker Oats round container.

[MsRobyn]

@filmore

We buy steel cut Irish oatmeal. It looks like little grains of rice cut in half. It comes in a box and pours easily into a measuring cup. However, we prefer to be able to dip the cup into the oats and pull out what we need. It’s too clumsy to do this from the box, so we transfer the boxed oats to a larger container. The container we use? An old Quaker Oats round container.

I buy steel-cut oats, too, but I buy them in bulk and keep them in a sealed Tupperware.

Mmmm… steel cut oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow! We need a yummy smiley like this guy.

[OpalCat]

@Kevbo

This is because rolled oats don’t flow or pour well. Cream o’ wheat flows, so you can pour it out of a box into a measuring cup through a small opening without too much worry of excess, so you don’t need to be able to return the excess back to the box. Most dry cereals like corn flakes also don’t flow very well, but it is not usually critical to measure them with accuracy.

To get oatmeal to come out the desired consistency (if you are the sort of person that is particular in that regard) you need to measure out the rolled oats and the water. A round open topped container makes it easier to dip a measuring cup into, and then strike off the excess back into the container. Pretty much the same reason for storing flour and sugar in canisters. By putting the oats into a functional canister-like package, you get to keep your branding message on the consumer’s shelf until the box is empty, which wouldn’t happen if she needed to transfer your product into a glass or metal canister prior to the first use.

Why round? Because you want the lid to come all the way off so you don’t have flaps getting in the way while you are using one hand to hold the measuring cup and the other to strike it level. By going round, you can make a paper lid that stays closed tight enough to keep most insects out…of course now oatmeal boxes have a metal rim and a plastic snap-on lid, but the tradition was established with a paper lid that telescoped over the box. Of course you could do that with a rectangular box, but that causes structural problems. The corners of a square paper lid would be weak points, the top of the open box won’t support itself well, so it will gap along the length of the sides unless you use much heavier paper. Think about those floppy gift boxes they use when you get a shirt for Christmas.

ETA a hijack: Now what I have always wondered about is how many layers of a Quaker holding a box of oats with a picture of a Quaker holding a box of oats with a picture of a Quaker… could you progress before the box became smaller than a molecule of the ink used to print the picture?

Am I misremembering? (Highly likely.) I seem to recall that Quaker Oats came in a round box, but that the top didn’t come off (hence no scooping out an amount in a measuring cup and leveling it off into the box) but rather had a metal “spout” that the oats came out of. Am I wrong? Is this not how they come? These days I order steel-cut oats online and have them shipped, so I don’t have a recent reference point for Quaker rolled oats.

[Kent_Clark]

@OpalCat

Am I misremembering? (Highly likely.) I seem to recall that Quaker Oats came in a round box, but that the top didn’t come off (hence no scooping out an amount in a measuring cup and leveling it off into the box) but rather had a metal “spout” that the oats came out of. Am I wrong? Is this not how they come? These days I order steel-cut oats online and have them shipped, so I don’t have a recent reference point for Quaker rolled oats.

You mean like a salt container?

In all the years I’ve been eating Quaker Oats (and I have a box in my pantry right now) I can’t ever remember them coming in a container with a spout. They always had that little thread zip strip that you pulled all the way around to make a lid.

[sitchensis]

Just a guess, but the cylinder style is pretty close in look to the countertop containers people have historically used to store flour and sugar. Maybe, early on, oatmeal was being touted more as an ingredient for breads and cookies rather than a breakfast food. They could have been aiming to try and be thought of as a kitchen staple. Something you replace when it runs out, rather than buy when you feel like it.

[kenobi_65]

@OpalCat

Am I misremembering? (Highly likely.) I seem to recall that Quaker Oats came in a round box, but that the top didn’t come off (hence no scooping out an amount in a measuring cup and leveling it off into the box) but rather had a metal “spout” that the oats came out of. Am I wrong? Is this not how they come?

AFAIK, if they ever came in that sort of container, it was a very long time ago.

Years ago, it was a cardboard top, and you used a string to separate the top from the tube, as kunilou describes. For at least the past 15 years, the tube has had a plastic lid on top.

[OpalCat]

I’m very likely misremembering, then. It’s been a very long time (like since I was a child) since I’ve had one of those boxes in my house.