Pop-Tarts: comedy, history, and toaster fires

I particularly enjoyed a routine in Jerry Seinfeld’s Netflix special 23 Hours to Kill about Pop-Tarts. He said to:

“Think back to when the Pop-Tart came out. It was the 60s. We had toast! We had orange juice frozen decades in advance. You had to hack at it with a knife. It was like a murder to get a couple of drops of liquidity in the morning. We had shredded wheat. It was like wrapping your lips around a wood chipper. You’d have breakfast, you had to take two days off so the scars could heal so you could speak….

That was breakfast. And in the midst of that dark and hopeless moment, the Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts suddenly appeared out of Battle Creek Michigan, which as you cereal fans know, is the corporate headquarters of Kellog’s and a town I have always wanted to visit … because it seems like a cereal Silicon Valley of breakfast super scientists … conceiving of the frosted, fruit filled, heatable rectangles in the same shape as the box it comes in … and with the same nutrition as the box it comes in too.

That was the hard part. I don’t know how long it took to invent the Pop-Tart, but they must have come out of that lab like Moses with the two tablets of the Ten Commandments.

‘The Pop-Tart is here! Two in the packet! Two slots in a toaster! Let’s see ya screw this up! Why two? One’s not enough. Three’s too many. And they can’t go stale ‘cause they weren’t ever fresh.’ “

History of Toaster Pastries

At Mashed on April 9, 2018 there is an article by Carissa Stanz titled The untold truth of Pop-Tarts. She said Post actually came up with Country Squares before Kelloggs but unveiled them before they were ready to hit the market. Kelloggs had time to knock off the product, and mass market first. An earlier article for the thirtieth anniversary by Steve Hymon in the Chicago Tribune on September 25, 1994 titled Toasting an icon compared the marketing:

“The names given to the two products were one more indication of Kellogg's superior marketing savvy. Kellogg appreciated that kids were the primary target audience for Pop-Tarts because they had yet to establish breakfast habits of their own. Post seems to have been more confused. As awful a name as Country Squares seems in 1994, it was arguably worse in 1964, when the word ‘square’ was widely used to mean ‘nerdy.’ When paired with ‘country,’ it seemed to describe a food for middle-age rubes from the sticks.”

My family tasted toaster pastries before they were sold in supermarkets

I remember tasting one type of unmarked toaster pastry before either was in supermarkets. My stay-at-home mother raising us five kids had signed up for a consumer panel that sent out free products to be tested. We just had to fill out a set of survey questions about our reactions. I vaguely recall that prototype product had less filling and was less tasty than what eventually appeared.  

Toaster pastries can cause fires

At the Miami Herald on June 27, 1993 there was a humor column by Dave Barry titled Tarts Afire. He discussed a fire in Ohio from pastries stuck in a toaster. A recent article at Extra Crispy on February 7, 2018 is titled Pop-Tarts are flammable, so we set some on fire. You never should leave a toaster unattended. Some toasters even can turn themselves on after a power failure, as described in CPSC recalls for ones from Waring and KitchenAid.

The pop tarts image came from Evan Amos at Wikimedia Commons. The toaster fire cartoon was adapted from an image of a Hamilton Beach toaster at Wikimedia Commons.