Yes, much of the mainstream cereal on the market is a lot closer to candy than a nourishing way to fuel you as you start your day.Ĭhoose wisely, though, and cereal can be nutritious enough to anchor a breakfast (or lunch, or dinner, or snack) of champions. But if you’re not careful, the sugary calories can add up fast. Consumer Reports recommended that parents choose cereal brands with better nutritional ratings for their children.Convenient and satisfying, cereal will always be a breakfast staple. magazine Consumer Reports found that Post's Golden Crisp and the similar Kellogg's Honey Smacks were the two brands with the highest sugar content-more than 50 percent (by weight)-commenting that one serving of this or other high-sugar cereals contained at least as much sugar "as there is in a glazed doughnut from Dunkin' Donuts". In a 2008 comparison of the nutritional value of 27 cereals, U.S. Shannon, who became tired of seeing so many cavities in his patients' mouths, bought hundreds of boxes of sugary breakfast cereal and analyzed the contents of each in a lab. In 1975, Super Orange Crisp was found to contain almost 71 percent sugar by dentist Ira Shannon. The focus of advertising shifted from targeting children to including parents, by downplaying the sweet taste (and associated sugar content). Sugar Bear's voice, provided by Gerry Matthews for forty years, was in the style of a suave crooner like Bing Crosby or Dean Martin. In later lines of commercials (the first listed produced exclusively for Canada), Sugar Bear would do battle with Stan, a security guard at the Sugar Crisp factory (from whom Sugar Bear would try to steal mass amounts of Sugar Crisp straight from the factory, often swimming in the honey used to sweeten it with the phrase "how sweet it is!"), or (one of the earliest and longest running of his co-stars) Granny, an elderly witch-like figure with a magic wand (voiced by June Foray in a nod to Foray's numerous other witch and granny-like character voices) who, despite liberal use of magic, could never keep Sugar Bear from helping himself to her Golden Crisp. The jingle was also expanded to conclude with "it's got the crunch with punch", although this was dropped in later years. This was dropped in the mid-to-late 1980s, where he would simply defeat his foes with a "vitamin-packed punch" as Sugar Bear.
In commercials, Sugar Bear could turn into "Super Bear" upon eating it. Later television advertisements feature one mascot, an anthropomorphic cartoon bear character known as Sugar Bear, who sings the jingle, "Can't get enough of that Sugar Crisp", to the tune of Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho. The early slogan said, "As a cereal it's dandy-for snacks it's so handy-or eat it like candy!" Early advertisements featured three animated cartoon bears named Dandy, Handy, and Candy as the mascots.
Īs of 2021, the product is still sold as Sugar Crisp in Canada, with ads displaying the Sugar Bear mascot and the phrase "Can't get enough of that Sugar Crisp." Marketing ġ955 advertisement, stating the "sugar crisp" was appropriate for breakfast, snack, or candyĪdvertisements in the 1950s positioned this sugar cereal as being appropriate to eat for breakfast, as a snack, or as candy, similar to candy-coated popcorn products like Cracker Jack. In the early 1970s, there was a short-lived variation on the original Sugar Crisp, called "Super Orange Crisp", which had orange-flavored O's in it. Finally, it was changed to "Golden Crisp" (during a time when many cereals dropped the word "Sugar" from their names) in the American market. In 1967, the name was changed to "Super Sugar Crisp", and in 1985, it was changed again to "Super Golden Crisp". The two cereals are both sweetened puffed wheat. Sugar Crisp debuted with what The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets would later call "an astonishing sugar content of 51 percent" (in weight), which remained the second highest in the US market when competitor Kellogg's introduced its Sugar Smacks (later renamed Honey Smacks) in the early 1950s which consisted of 55% sugar. The Post version was originally called "Happy Jax", and was renamed to "Sugar Crisp" the next year. Post Foods introduced their own version in 1948. The product concept was re-introduced unsuccessfully in 1939 by another business as Ranger Joe, the first pre-sweetened, candy-coated breakfast cereal. At the 1904 World Fair, the Quaker Oats Company made a candy-coated puffed cereal, a wheat-based product similar to Cracker Jack's candy-coated popcorn.