QUESTION: Ever since I was a kid and read the back of the cereal box as I was downing a bowl of cereal before going to school, I’ve loved them. Cereal boxes were fun and often had games to play on the back and many contained prizes inside. Recently, as I was cleaning out an old desk drawer, I came upon several of the prizes I had retrieved from cereal boxes. At first, I would eat the cereal until the prize suddenly fell out as I poured some of it into my bowl. But after a while, I became impatient and dumped the cereal from a newly opened box into a large bowl or pot to search for the prize. Are these little prizes collectible today? I know mothers detested the prizes found in McDonald’s Happy Meals and saw them as junk. What about the cereal prizes?
ANSWER: A cereal box prize was a form of advertising that involved using a promotional toy or small item that cereal makers offered as an incentive to buy their brand. Prizes could be found inside or sometimes on the cereal box. The term "cereal box prize" is sometimes used to include premiums that consumers could order through the mail from an advertising promotion printed on the outside of the cereal box.
Cereal makers distributed prizes and premiums in four ways. The first was an in-store prize handed to the customer with the purchase of one or more specified boxes of cereal. The second was to include the prize in the box itself, usually outside the liner bag. The third was attaching the prize to the box, such as printing games and trading cards on the cereal box or simply attaching the prize to the box with tape or shrink wrap. Some prizes included a gameboard or other interactive activity printed on the box that corresponded with the prize inside the box, which kids used as a gamepiece. The fourth method of distribution was to have the consumer mail in the UPC proof-of-purchase labels cut from a specified number of boxes, sometimes with a cheque or money order to defray the cost of shipping. A third-party sent the premium to the consumer by mail.
In 1909, Kellogg’s offered the first cereal box prize. Shoppers who purchased two boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes received a copy of Funny Jungleland Moving-Pictures, a little booklet illustrated with dancing tigers, storks, horses, hippos and more. Children pulled a tab to slide new pictures in and out, creating new combinations of the animals’ heads, bodies and feet. By 1912, consumers redeemed The Funny Jungleland Moving Pictures Book 2.5 million times.
With the success of the Kellogg’s prize campaign, other cereal makers, including General Mills, Malt-O-Meal, Nabisco, Nestlé, Post Foods, and Quaker Oats, followed suit and inserted prizes into boxes of their cereals to promote sales and brand loyalty.
The first prizes buried inside cereal boxes were small pinback buttons decorated with World War II U.S. Military insignia, available in Pep, at that time Superman’s favorite cereal.
By the 1920s, cereal companies turned to then-popular radio shows to advertise their premiums.
The invention of a screw injection molding machine by American inventor James Watson Hendry in 1946 changed the world of cereal box prizes. Thermoplastics could be used to produce toys much more rapidly, and much more cheaply, because recycled plastic could be remolded using this process. In addition, injection molding for plastics required much less cool-down time for the toys, because the plastic wasn’t completely melted before injected into the molds.
During the 1940s and 1950s, cereal prizes followed a transportation theme, with metal or plastic cut-out planes, cut-out trains, and license plates included in General Mills offerings. It wasn’t until 1943 that Kellogg’s placed a model airplane into a package of its Pep Whole Wheat Flakes cereal.
Also in the 1950s, the maker of Wheaties distributed brightly-painted steel automobile maker emblems, representing 31 American and European auto makers, including luxury names like Bugatti, Alfa Romeo and Rolls Royce alongside now-defunct manufacturers like Kaiser, Hudson and Riley.
In the 1970s, Hendry developed the first gas-assisted injection molding process in the 1970s, which permitted the production of complex, hollow prizes that cooled quickly. This greatly improved design flexibility as well as the strength and finish of manufactured parts while reducing production time, cost, weight, and waste.
All kinds of collectible figures—from rocket ships and submarines to cartoon characters and rings—could be cranked out and hidden beneath cereal.
In the early 1980s, Apple Jacks cereal included a rubbery, squid-looking toy in every box that could be thrown at walls and slowly “crawl” down to the ground as it stuck and unstuck itself. Even the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles got their turn.
And in 1996, General Mills distributed the PC video game Chex Quest on CD in boxes of Chex cereal.
Today, cereal box prizes have become a unique collectible. Most vintage cereal box prizes sell anywhere from $5 to $30, but rare ones can go for as high as $175 for a Banana Splits TV Show ring and and $250 for a General Mills Lucky Charms Game.
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