I stood in the breakfast aisle at the Fred Meyer on Hawthorne last Thursday with a mask fogging my glasses, looking at a shelf that had been the same for my whole life and will not be the same by fall. Aunt Jemima. Mrs. Butterworth's. The box of Cream of Wheat two rows down. Every one of those brands had announced a review, a rename, or a retirement inside a single week.
Quaker went first. Mars followed on Uncle Ben's the same day. Conagra and B&G were out with statements before that Friday.
Seventy two hours to undo a hundred and thirty years of packaging. Which tells you exactly how hard it was.
A caricature comes off a box because packaging is the cheapest thing a food conglomerate owns, and the speed of these decisions is evidence of that, not evidence of courage.
I want to be careful here, because the change is good and the people who spent decades arguing for it were right. Nobody should have to buy syrup from a minstrel figure. The floor is the floor and it needed raising.
But I have sat in the rooms where this math gets done. A package redesign runs on a cycle these brands already fund. Plates, dielines, a shelf test, six to nine months, a line in the marketing budget that exists whether or not anything is wrong. The cost of retiring the mascot is a redesign they could have paid for in any year since 1955.
Compare that to the things nobody announced last week. Who is on the brand team. Who owns the P&L. Which agencies get the roster call and which ones get the diversity slide. What a plant supervisor in Iowa makes. Whether the person who raised this internally in 2016 is still employed there.
Those changes cost real money and real power, and none of them fit in a press release with a before and after image, which is why they were not in one.
So the test I would apply, if I were on the inside of any of these companies right now, is a boring one. In eighteen months, when the new packaging is on shelf and the news cycle has moved on, what else will be different? If the answer is a font, you did the easy part and stopped.
The floor is the floor and it needed raising.
I bought the syrup. Truffles met me at the door and inspected the bag for anything that might contain fish, found none, and left in visible protest. She will never know that the bottle in there is about to be a case study in every branding deck in America. Honestly, I envy her.