TIL Pop-Tarts are now lower quality than the old generic knock offs
Haven't bought name brand Pop-Tarts in years, but have occasionally picked up Toaster 'Betes or whatever the off-brand versions are called.
Noticed a 'sale' on the name brand and got conned into buying them. They're now smaller, have less frosting, and have way less filling. The damn things were so flimsy that two of them snapped trying to take them out of the toaster.
If you get a craving for some nice sugary betes for breakfast, stick to the off-brands. They're now higher quality than the name brand.
The future is stupid.
149 replies
As a US emigrant, every time I go back to the US the first thing I buy is Pop Tarts because it's the hardest thing to get outside the US, and is the thing I miss the most. And it's years between. And every time it's significantly worse than the last time. It's not just your imagination - the quality loss is not just noticeable but STAGGERING.
You have your priorities, others have theirs…
Woah woah woah. What are you thinking? We need all the pop tart revenue we can get. The line doesn't keep going up all by itself!
Pray tell, what did Trump Rapes Kids comment to get banned?
People in the UK are saying it about Cadbury too. :(
Kinder chocolate is still safe. Hershey's been dead since 2006. Kitkats died (for me) when they removed the foil barrier, sad moment for chocolate lovers everywhere.
Fortunately and unexpected Milano Cookies are really good and have replaced Kinder Buenos because they've gotten too sweet.
I think I've hit my mid 30's dark chocolate phase because dark chocolate is delicious.
Just FYI, KitKats are Nestle, so you can give yourself a pat on the back for not buying them anymore. My sad chocolate moment was when I learned that After Eight is made by Nestle. It used to be my favourite treat. I haven't had one in 16 years. They probably don't taste the same anymore anyway.
Knock off after eights are just as good though. Knock off KitKats are not quite as good (as I remember KitKats from my childhood, which is probably a lot better than they are now)
They got bought by an American company, so naturally the suck followed. Sale should've been stopped.
Its owned by an american company now though, just don't buy it.
That explains a lot. I used to live the raspberry ones so much and couldn't wait to share them with my two girls.
All I got was, "Dad, these suck."
So I tried one and was just baffled. It did suck. I chalked it up to my taste buds changing, but this makes much more sense.
Chocolate has gotten worse and worse too.
I'm fairly certain they stopped using actual ingredients and make all the flavors exclusively with artificial flavors now. Everything tastes like the same corn syrupy artificially flavored trash. The flavors used to actually be differentiated and taste like something besides sweetened chemical disaster.
I tried a twinkie for the first time in ages and maybe it is just a rose‑tinted memory but I swear they tasted better when I was a kid. It was really dry and the filling barely had any flavor. It was just greasy.
Cosmic brownies and oatmeal cream pies..... Not good now either.
I believe I read recently that the price of cocoa beans has gotten much more expensive so chocolate producers have started using more sugar. Therefore the chocolate is lower quality.
I'd rather pay more and eat less of it for real chocolate.
They have been omitting chocolate entirely from some things. There was a whole thing recently with Reese's trying to make on of their chocolate and peanut butter candies with no real chocolate.
Cacao prices went up sharply a couple-few years ago, but have gone back down the last year or two.
It's part of why Dubai Chocolate everything was a trend. Use a fraction of the chocolate but charge a premium? Nearly every chocolate producer was all over that.
It doesn't even matter if cocoa was more expensive.
They will look for any way to make it cheaper, quality be damned. 2¢ saved per candy bar looks great on an excel spreadsheet, the only thing that matters to those fucking finance bro clowns.
Course it matters. There's a reason they weren't already doing it.
It's also because they're shit. I loved them once, too. They were shit then, too. I just didn't realize how shit this shit was because of the sugar high. Every few years you just cone more to your senses. Shitty chemical sugar foods are worse than any drug.
That's fucking interesting. I'm one too but haven't been back once in five years. Partly because it's hard to travel en famille halfway across the world (but mostly because of the good reasons not to).
What's the vibe like? I hear shit has gotten weird.
It's depressing. Granted, I'm from a place that was already depressing BEFORE I left, but it's way worse now. Last time I was back I was there for a month and I don't think I saw a person smile in public that entire time.
I've heard similar. We're not meant to live like that, we need to be part of a society. Or at least think of ourselves as part of a larger context. Or at least smile in public.
I buy store brand everything now. It's ridiculous. Have you had a brand name Fig Newton lately? It's sawdust. Ridiculous.
I have not but I might have made that mistake in the future. Thanks for the warning. It's so weird that off-brands for everything appeared as cheaper lower quality versions and then the world went to such shit they're now the higher quality version.
How are so many things now worse quality and higher priced than their own knock-offs? They should all be committing Sudoku in shame.
They earned public trust and brand-recognition over many years. Then, once they became the de facto product, they started min-maxing their production. Smaller portions, cheaper ingredients, automating as much of the production line as possible to cut employees, reducing wages for "less work", etc. They're hoping no one would notice that the product you're buying isn't living up to the original standard.
If you're willing to pay the same price for cheaper production, then the company can literally make money without having to sell more product. They can show in their shareholder meetings that sales are going way up, even though consumer purchases may not have changed much at all. Heck, even if sales are going down, profits could still show an increase!
Then of course, there's "inflation," which they use to justify raising prices over time. Even though the product is worse than the original, you're now paying way more for it.
This is the endgame of capitalism. Maximize profits at the cost of consumers. When money is the primary focus of a business, quality of goods and services will always degrade over time.
You can read about The Thermocline of Trust, which I found interesting.
The Pillsbury Doughboy has a bit of a belly, it might be difficult to disembowel himself with a math puzzle.
I appreciate the typo, it's funnier.
It’s not a typo, just a meme. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/commit-sudoku
Paper cuts are no joke when you're only 2 inches tall.
I am convinced the terms "generic" and "off brand" are both psyops to get people more into big brands.
I mean, back in the day they were true. You could get the name brand stuff, or the off brand stuff that looked mostly the same but had a weird after taste or something. Now the name brand stuff has degraded completely but the off brands have barely changed. Hopefully it stays this way, because we're like 2 steps of enshittification away from everything tasting like sawdust.
Seppuku*
Gesundheit
They really never were. This was a reputation, yes, but it was not warranted. It's taken a hell of a long time for enough people to realize this.
Nothing significant has changed in the last couple of decades, at least. Maybe back into the 60s, 70s, 80s or so, I won't debate. But since the turn fo the century at a minimum, store brands almost always use a producer that produces for name brands. It's often literally the same product. At worst, it might be stuff that didn't quite make the name brand standards, or it might hvae a little less quality or something, but almost all of the time, it's the same thing.
There might be some exception - I certainly haven't tried the myriad of store brands for stores I haven't gone to, but i've been buying mostly store brands for quite a number of years now, and almost all the time, there's no difference.
Like one I can think of: Store-brand "Doritos" might have a bit less "cheese" on them. Or might have the same, depends. Most of the time it's the same thing, though.
Yeah... I'm talking about all those years you're skipping. Off-brands didn't used to be made on the same production lines. And since the off-brand pop tarts are much different and better, it seems they're still not.
If you can get them, the Clover Valley ones ($1.85 @ Dollar General) are pretty good, although the fig filling is golden rather than brown.
Thank you. Will give em a try!
psssst... Nature's Bakery are dope.
Speaking of fig newtons. We started getting dried rosselino or Salem white figs in bulk and just having those instead. So much better than any fig newtons thing.
European here: I only once got some imported ones in a shop here and tried them, and I was puzzled why people seem to be so fond of them. They tasted disgusting and artificial.
Disgusting and artificial is American, both our people and foods.
I never tried them, but I once read their box in a US supermarket and I'm surprised that they could be made lower quality.
It's a lot of childhood marketing associating things like cartoons and commercials for the product. Because they were expensive and sugary, parents would make them a special indigence.
As a child I used to love them when I could get them, then I had a real pastry with jam in the middle never went back. I was so upset about how much better a real part was and why we never have them, when they were basically the same price at the time. But we lived in the county, so an hour-long drive to get them every other day made no sense, either.
Maybe it's just me, but I ran through a lot of typical heavily marketed food items for kids when I was one, and always ended up hungry an hour later. Learned early on how much of that stuff was garbage.
Pastries like that should basically be made from flour, water, sugar, fruit, baking soda, and butter. Pop Tarts are not actually food, though. They have an ingredient list as long as your arm full of disgusting and cheap edible food-like substances.
It helps a bit if you toast them. That's what the "pop" part means.
is there a reason moat European pasteries seem so organic and like they weren't made in a sterile environment?
Less capitalism so far, more small bakeries.
I think the way most cities are organised in the divided states of southern northern america doesn't work as well with smaller shops. You need walkable city centers for those, and especially rural areas have these large shopping center junctions with Target, Walmart etc and big parking lots - then bigger cities where living downtown is unaffordable and again you have the suburbs with these shopping areas that are almost industrialised. In most of these environments, smaller shops that could sell more or less homemade / handmade flour-based products wouldn't stand a chance.
large shopping centers don't exist in rural US cities, thats mid-sized cities.
Assuming you are a DS citizen, your definition of a large shopping center may vary. Also, your definition of rural :) That said, I was referring to "large junctions with shopping centers", not "junctions with large shopping centers". What I mean is a road crossing with 3-4 supermarkets, each of which has a parking lot around 200x100 yards
True, I do think of that being the bare minimum lot size for a supermarket :) and am thinking a small city is less than 10,000 people
That's a town. City starts at 100K in North America.
Personally tho, I don't think it's a population thing but a composition thing; any place so spread out you need a car to get around is just a large suburb. LA? Houston? Just overgrown suburbs. Yes by that definition, only NYC, DC, maybe Boston and Chicago are cities.
Wel, moats are not known for being sterile
Brand names mean nothing anymore. The 80's are over. Everything comes from a supplier and companies stamp their brand on it. Buy the things that are quality and ignore the brand, unless the brand has a reputation for being horrible.
That's not exactly true.
Yes, most of it is manufactured by a co-packer. And these co-packers also make similar products for other brands. But each one (usually) has their own recipe. Sometimes the differences are very minor, others can be drastic. Sometimes they have specialty ingredients (e.g. Himalayan sea salt instead of regular salt, or a partner brand). Sometimes the co-packer offers a standard recipe as a starter for the smaller brands.
Historically, the brand-name used a higher-quality recipe, worthy of the higher sale price. Generics would use something cheaper, comfortably taking the lower end of the market. Costco's Kirkland brand is famous for going a step higher than the major brand, which is very unusual for a house brand.
Anecdotal, but it was true for the company I worked for. Used to make ten brands of sump hose - the only difference was the bag we put it in and which fittings were included. The material, molds, and specs never varied.
Yeah, the weird part being that the off-brands are now better quality than the name brands. When they suddenly drop in quality to match everything will taste like sawdust and tears.
I don't know if it's nostalgia or if the recipe has changed but I feel Pop Tarts are worse than when I was a kid (late 80s / early 90s).
Pop tarts are infinitely shittier than they were even 5 years ago, it's not just you. I bought one pack last year and never will again. They are trash crackers that feel like some bean counter went "yep still frosted on top, filling in the middle, good to go". Now they are trying to sell "super stuffed" variants too that still don't meet the old standards. Fuck poptarts.
::: spoiler Trash.
:::
My eyes
LOL, WTF is that photo.
The decline of an empire, visualized.
Ever since Pop Tarts started going down the shitter I've been saying they'd make a fortune if they did their own version of the Double Stuf Oreo aka just sell Pop Tarts with an actual amount of filling with measurable thickness rather than a thin sheen. Now by the time they've gotten around to it, they're still a bastardized shrinkflation shadow of their former selves, and the flavors they chose for them look utterly unappealing on the box to boot.
Same way with hot pockets, you can't drip any hot sauce or grease on your face because there's almost nothing in them. These days I make my snacks.
Late 40s here so same, it's definitely not nostalgia. I was a chonkey bastard so I'd get the s'mores ones once they came out and eat the crust ring on the outside then pull them open to gorge on the sweet s'mores innards.
There's so little filling now that both halves seem bare, and the things are so thin and brittle they crack into a dozen pieces in the attempt.
Lol, I'm glad someone else would eat the crust ring first.
I would break off the crust pieces and eat those, and then break the poptart in half long-ways so I had two long strips, enabling me to take very large full-mouth bites of just the sweet frosted and filled part
Pillsbury Toaster Strudel has been the superior product in this space since the 90s.
Discovered this about three weeks ago when I was home alone for a couple weeks and decided to indulge in some childhood favorites. I should have known better. They're wafer thin now and the filling is only in the middle 60% of the pastry. I was sad.
Spam is still the same quality, though, I'm happy to report.
As a kid with three siblings, it was always a big deal when one kid ate all the marshmallows out of the Lucky Charms. At some point, Mom started buying Marshmallow Mateys. Came in a big bag instead of a box at a fraction of the price. I noticed then that the charm to lucky ratio was a lot higher. Many more marshmallows.
Marshmallows are cheaper than grains, also are we calling the grains luckies?
No
Back then I tried an off brand Lucky charms and it had a weird after taste. They're all so much better now. I'm all about those dog food sized bags of Golden Grams and Korn Pops.
They were based on real tarts originally. They've gotten so crappy you might as well go back to baking them yourself.
https://www.farmhouseonboone.com/homemade-pop-tarts/
I once bought them in a "american sectuon" in a supermarket, because i kept seeing them on tv. I couldn't believe that people would actually eat sweet cardboard and like it.
I think baking tarts is a sex crime.
Boring ass dystopia. They also made a "new" one that's has extra filling etc. It's basically the original but now they charge out the ass and give you half as many
Product death by a thousand cuts. Cut here, cut there...
Every can of pringles I buy now is undercooked and the last can I bought they forgot to add salt to any of the chips. (No it wasn’t labeled as “reduced salt” or anything like that, I checked)
Ya. I really noticed the recent decline in pringles. As cheap and crappy as they were before, they are noticeably way worse now.
The "hot ones" are good, though. I still prefer the Pringles style Lays buffalo wing flavor, but those are damn hard to find.
If anyone’s interested, Bon Appétit had a “Gourmet Makes” or something where one of their chefs would recreate snacks like Oreos, Pop Tarts, and others. They look great. I tried a version of the oreos, mine were nowhere near as pretty, but the taste is so much better.
The equity firms will enshittify everything
If it has "equity" or "capital" in its name you are fucked.
I’ll have to keep that in mind: I get a craving for pop tarts every 6 months ago. I never understood it because it’s so much worse than my memory and they are just not edible. I’d rather eat the box.
Next time I’ll have to see whether there is a generic
Bakeries in the US (or at least DC) will often make actually good tasting pop tarts. The store bought ones are always too dry for me to enjoy regardless of brand. It's like eating cardboard.
Oh we know.
They are garbage.
Winco ones are the bomb. Love employee owned stores - overall quality there is top-notch.
What the fuck is happening to WinCo's bulk food prices though? Ive bought there for decades and it's now more expensive per pound than boxed Quaker oats(General Mills) granola sold in the same store, WinCo!?!
I almost lost my shit last month trying to reconcile how it could happen. Is WinCo doing target enshittification? Is GM reducing gouging?
I've also noticed yogurt pricing is not competitive some times with grocery outlet.
Yup. Whatever the generic store brand is 1000% better. I tried both recently too and Pop Tarts were disappointing.
They do have more flavor options but that’s really it.
And the frosting is embarrassing
So it's basically a cracker now?
It's like a cracker sandwich with the same amount of filling you'd get by lightly buttering toast.
They are also ultra processed. They probably don't really even have to wrap them in that fake foil wrap because they are gonna stay exactly the same without it.
Dude those things are more sugary than a handful of candy along with minimal nutritional value. They were good like 15+ years ago but the enshittification has fully run its course. I stopped buying them years ago..
You.... you actually toast them?
I never have consumed them on a regular basis, but I don't think I've ever toasted them a single time. lol
I don't like my food raw. You should see how black my m... ok, that started to sound like a sex joke. But really I burn the shit out of meat.
how? like, are they made out of salmonella and smallpox pustules?
I'm partial to the listeria flavor myself
those are pretty good; I like the mountain dew and zika flavour, the crunchy bits are lovely
Y'all, Poptarts were always garbage in a mylar pouch, only made popular by marketing.
The fact that the Toaster Strudel exists is evidence that pop tarts are a kludge of a bastardization of a good thing, so far removed from the real deal, as to be indistinguishable from it. They started enshittified, and only had one way to go from there.
Scan with with Yuka app and I bet you'll find more garbage in them. Oddly enough, a lot of big named brands have the most toxic additives.
That's a cool app.
Food sold in the US or Europe, at least, does not have toxic additives. If you're scared of "chemicals", please for the love of the earth, educate yourself.
Must be nice to have it all figured out. I'm just going to keep being naive and scan my food for junk additives.
Name some of your "scary" chemicals.
Just read the label on the package?
The nice thing about the Yuka app is it links to science papers. If half of them are correct then that's a win.
Oh, I see. Nice.
either choice too sugary for me, would try a poptart without frosting if was a thing
I mean.. unfrosted pop tarts are a thing. The pastry itself is so sweet though that the actual nutritional difference seems pretty minor (something like 5g more of sugar per 2 pack of pop tarts when comparing frosted vs unfrosted strawberry)
The American trick is to dip them in high fructose corn syrup to help wash down the sugar.
You have to have the frosting. There’s so little filling that you can’t taste it, but you need something on the cardboard
They do! They have a strawberry one that doesn’t have frosting and it’s so much better, in my opinion.
https://www.poptarts.com/en_US/products/all-flavors/pop-tarts-unfrosted-strawberry-product.html
Apparently, pop tarts without frosting are a thing... They are probably still really sugary even without the frosting.
I love poptarts and miss them immensely. I haven't eaten them in ~20 years (they've gelatin in them). Literally nobody wants to step up and make decent vegan Poptarts. Tesco used to sell a brand (then stopped) ALDI sold their own poptart for a while (which was vegan but they kinda sucked) they stopped.... I know they're "disgusting" and "artificial" but sometimes that's exactly what I want lol.
Since nobody asked, I want a decent vegan Philly roll.
I'm hoping both our culinary dreams are fulfilled for us one day buddy
https://youtu.be/wbfoyRAUfys?is=XcHt3vJmig56akRD
Okay, I have to put my foot down. Pop-Tarts originally didn't have frosting and they were much better. I don't want to hear any more about this frosting shit.
The frosting started in 1967. It's sort of been a while on that one.
Some varieties/flavors never had frosting. Thus the confusion.
I don't remember any that didn't, only a few flavors that normally came frosted but also had a marked unfrosted version.
Is this a Mandela effect thing from the universe you came from? Did the Monopoly man have his monocle there?
I dunno. Maybe. I didn’t eat a ton of pop tarts, honestly. But I’m fairly sure there were unfrosted flavors back in the day.
But I still have a monopoly set with a battleship as one of the playing pieces.
Wait, they try to say that wasn't one of them now? Because of course it was.
I started eating them when they first came out in my area in '65.
I don't know about knock off brands but there were such better options for toaster pastries since the 90's. So much so one of my kids tried a pop tart at some point and thought there disgusting. Overly sweet on a cardboard cracker.
I think they have always been bad. All the brand bame stuff is usually bad. You just gotta look for the good stuff.
Now I usually either have a PBJ or bread rolls or even soda crackers and bananas for breakfast.
I'm a barbarian, I'll just rip a chunk off of a loaf of bread and microwave it for a few seconds so it's all warm and moist.
Oh, and I cook entire packs of bacon at once so sometimes I'll cram some bacon in there, with some hash browns from the air fryer and microwaved eggs. Just like barbarians used to do.
In this economy!!!!
Sometimes I can't help it, I just need to season my bread with protein and more carbs.
Pop tarts have always sucked.
Toaster Strudels is where its at.
True dat. There is Lemmy tho, so. Half-credit.
That's too bad. Recently I've been thinking of picking some up again. They taste good burnt (to me). Or I should say they used to, I guess...
I can't believe they've never done double-frosted Pop Tarts. It's sitting RIGHT THERE. It's so obvious!
At this point the only brand name stuff that's truly ahead is soda 😭
I dunno, Aldi and Lidl in the UK have half decent cola, lemonade and other flavours of fizzy drinks. Their iced tea isn't too bad either.
When the price difference is less than £1 per 2Litre bottle or over £3 for the branded stuff I'll put up with the difference.
That's a fair point. I'm mostly just firing a shot at the shitty walmart brand ones, but it's probably way better elsewhere
Nope. Store brands are better IMO and half the price.
Yeah maybe it's just Walmart specifically that shits the bed :P
"If you get a craving for some nice sugary betes for breakfast"
Absolutely not me (and most of the world) IRL. You Americans think desert is an acceptable choice for any meal. It's no wonder how your bodies are so fucked up.
Also, "betes"?
It's short for die-a-betes but the die part sounds scary.
Look man what did I do to you
I just wanna eat breakfast
Oh sorry, I forgot pain au chocolat and danish were invented in the US. Surely no one but filthy Americans eat sugar in the morning. I think pop tarts suck but we've got bigger problems than pastry. If the health care system gave access to preventative medicine it'd go a long way toward fixing shit.
Also, is this you whining about someone's typo in another thread? Maybe shut the fuck up about minor spelling mistakes. Fucking prescriptivists, I swear to fuck. Who do you really think you're helping with those comments, seriously?
No no, you see those are European desert breakfasts. And they all fail compared to the proper and healthy European breakfast: coffee and a cigarette
Right, because the rest of the world doesnt have nutella
You people lol