Content provided in partnership with
A Charm's Life - Lucky Charm's cereal
Discover, August, 1999 by Karen Wright
It takes a few rocket scientists to make great cereal these days
MANY A CULTURAL ICON has had a home in Minneapolis, Minnesota: Mall of America, Mary Tyler Moore, Jesse "The Body" Ventura, the Artist formerly known as Prince. It's a city that means different things to different folks. To a starstruck breed of cereal lovers, for example, Minneapolis means Lucky Charms. For 35 years, Lucky the Leprechaun and his parti-colored product have thrived in the Minneapolis suburb of Golden Valley on General Mills Boulevard just south of Betty Crocker Drive. And for 35 years the cereal's popularity has remained undiminished. The oat-and-marshmallow medley is one of General Mills's top sellers, and one of the longest-running success stories in kids' cereals.
- More Articles of Interest
- The leprechaun's kettle.(Short Story)
- General Mills is converting all its Big G cereals--including such brands as...
- Favorite Brands International - Supplier Profiles - Brief Article - Company...
- The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb. - book reviews
- Learning to Love Neanderthals - 25,000-year-old child's body found in Portugal
But unlike other august brands--Cheerios, say, or Corn Flakes--Lucky Charms owes much of its success to continual reinvention. Over the decades, the marshmallow bits have undergone radical transformations in shape, size, and color. At first it was just pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers; they were magically delicious. Then the mutants began to appear. Blue diamonds. Purple horseshoes. Red balloons. Swirled whales. A rainbow. A snowman. A pot of gold. The Eiffel Tower. The frosted oat nuggets have stayed the same all along. But that plain and unchanging substrate has only served to highlight the jarring mutability of the so-called marbits. What mysterious forces are shaping the evolution of Lucky Charms?
In the Bisquick conference room at General Mills headquarters, assistant marketing manager Patricia Chang offers an explanation that owes as much to Adam Smith as to Charles Darwin. She's brought along a box of Lucky Charms featuring the cereal's latest permutation: tiny marbit charms in saturated colors and substandard sizes that the company launched last March. "Whenever we have a new event like this, we see anywhere between a 10 to 20 percent bump in sales," says Chang. It's survival of the fittest at its finest.
And fitness in food, as in any other population, depends on the diversity of the gene pool. The food engineers at General Mills first clued in to this dynamic in 1975, when blue diamonds were introduced to the "standard mix" and sales of the cereal jumped 31 percent. Adding purple horseshoes in 1983 increased sales another 25 percent. When red balloons joined the party in 1989, sales increased again. Each time, there were permanent gains. In 1990, General Mills chairman and chief executive Bruce Atwater used these figures to challenge economists' theory of product "life cycles," according to which every product is born, grows, matures, and dies in a grim and inevitable are of sales.
A seasoned researcher cites three factors for the cereal's unique appeal. "It's the marshmallows, it's the marshmallows, it's the marshmallows," says Jim Geoffrion, a department head at the General Mills technical center. To determine which marbit designs kids find most enticing, Geoffrion explains, the market research department conducts frequent "concept-ideation" studies. A general principle has emerged. More is better. Bright colors are better than subdued pastels, and a greater variety of designs in each package is better than the measly four that launched the cereal.
Today's youths also prefer patterned charms in multiple colors. Satisfying that preference requires manufacturing technology that was perfected only in the last decade. The basic recipe for the marbits is uncomplicated: sugar, corn syrup, and gelatin. The ingredients are melted together and whipped to a foamy consistency, then squeezed out, or extruded, in strips of specified shapes that are cut into individual pieces and dried slowly at low temperatures. The colors are added during the roam phase, before extrusion, and the shapes are determined by the extrusion dies. The trick lies in getting those patterned marbits that children find so appealing. Separate streams of colored foams have to be "co-extruded"--squeezed out through the dies together at exactly the same rate, just as the colors in striped toothpaste come out of the tube in sync. That takes some doing because, unlike toothpaste, the marshmallow foam is compressible, and controlling the flow rate of a compressible foam is a problem more worthy of rocket science than food science.
In fact, the flow-rate problem constrains the kinds of&signs that Geoffrion and his crew can execute in their marshmallow medium. It is relatively easy to make multicolored marbits with equal volumes of each color, squeezed out at the same rate. A lower-volume color accent--such as a smile on the man-in-the-moon marbit--requires a different flow rate during extrusion, and the only thing harder than stabilizing compressible fluids at the same flow rate, says Geoffrion, is synchronizing compressible foams with varying flow rates.
Within these daunting limits, General Mills has achieved an impressive expansion in the complexity and diversity of the marbit community. In addition to tweaking the standard mix every few years, the company concocts limited-edition medleys, like the "tiny" campaign, two or three times a year. Themes have included charms shaped like Olympic torches and medals, seasonal tokens such as mittens and snowmen, and an around-the-world promotion featuring Egyptian pyramid- and Statue of Liberty-shaped marshmallows, among other wonders. In contrast, the oat pieces--bells, fishes, arrowheads, clovers, and crosses--haven't changed since the cereal was invented in the early 1960s.
Find Research Guides for:
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »