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.
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At this point the only brand name stuff that’s truly ahead is soda 😭
Nope. Store brands are better IMO and half the price.
Yeah maybe it’s just Walmart specifically that shits the bed :P
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
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.
Trash.
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.
LOL, WTF is that photo.
The decline of an empire, visualized.
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.
My eyes
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
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.
I buy store brand everything now. It’s ridiculous. Have you had a brand name Fig Newton lately? It’s sawdust. Ridiculous.
psssst… Nature’s Bakery are dope.
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.
Seppuku*
Gesundheit
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.
How are so many things now worse quality and higher priced than their own knock-offs?
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.
committing Sudoku in shame
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.
appeared as cheaper lower quality versions
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!
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.
Winco ones are the bomb. Love employee owned stores - overall quality there is top-notch.
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
The future is stupid.
True dat. There is Lemmy tho, so. Half-credit.
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.
And the frosting is embarrassing
trying to take them out of the toaster.
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.
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.
the most toxic additives.
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.
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.
That’s a cool app.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’d rather pay more and eat less of it for 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.
People in the UK are saying it about Cadbury too. :(
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.
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)
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.
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.
Oh no, don’t come back again unless you’re very, very white and haven’t picked up any noticeable accent. These shitty Pop Tarts aren’t worth dying for.
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!
You have your priorities, others have theirs…
Pray tell, what did Trump Rapes Kids comment to get banned?
“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”?Right, because the rest of the world doesnt have nutella
You people lol
Look man what did I do to you
I just wanna eat breakfast
It’s short for die-a-betes but the die part sounds scary.
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.
desert
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
On we know.
They are garbage.
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.
