If you ate cereal between the 1950s and 1990s, you were likely to encounter a cereal box prize — an inexpensive trinket lurking inside the bag that may have made the difference between a kid choosing Fruit Loops over Lucky Charms. Browse the cereal aisle today, though, and you won’t find much in the way of in-box toy incentives. So what happened? It all started in the early 1900s, when Quaker Oats awarded consumers free bowls of fine China in exchange for box tokens. In the 1930s, General Mills began enticing kids with paper airplanes and trading cards packed inside cereal boxes. By the 1950s, Kellogg’s began inserting tiny submarines and scuba-diving frogmen into their cereals. The submarines could be filled with baking soda that allowed them to plunge and resurface in bathwater. By the 2000s, cereal toys seemed to be growing scarce. Cereal companies never made any formal announcements about their shifting marketing strategies, but because of the focus on eating healthier, companies began including pedometers in boxes of cereal to encourage physical activity. Environmental concerns were also in play, with companies recognizing that the mass production of plastic items likely to be discarded isn’t exactly a public relations win. Cereal incentives still exist, but the days of firing off a plastic rocket over the breakfast table are pretty much over.
