The company has yet to announce what new shape will be replacing the hourglass marshmallow in every box but, historically, Lucky Charms has not been shy about tinkering with its own magic formula. Last May, consumers with a real sweet tooth got to sample marshmallow-only boxes of the cereal. Then by the holiday season, Cinnamon Vanilla Lucky Charms hit the shelves. Those boxes included special snowball and snowmen-shaped marshmallows. Especially not when they're marshmallow. This spring, Lucky Charms is retiring the yellow hourglass marshmallow from their cereal boxes.
Technically though, an hourglass made of marshmallow doesn't actually have any sand in it, so Of those original shapes, only the pink heart marshmallows remain. Instead, HuffPost revealed that there is only one original marshmallow remaining in the lineup, the pink heart.
A General Mills spokesperson even told the publication that the addition of the blue diamond in increased sales by over 30 percent. Over the years, the marshmallow shapes and colors have evolved to include rainbows, clovers, hearts, balloons, horseshoes, shooting stars, and blue moons among others. Lucky Charms has remained popular with consumers for more than half a century, but fans of the iconic breakfast cereal may be surprised by how much they don't know about this inventive combination of food-science experimentation and advertising mastery.
Read on to discover the untold truth of Lucky Charms. Oddly enough, the history of Lucky Charms is inexorably linked with that of the Circus Peanut, that most derided of candies. According to the Capital Times , legend has it that Lucky Charms came to be thanks to General Mills executive John Holahan , who was working on developing a new cereal that children would want so much they would beg their parents to buy it.
One day, he had a crazy-yet-brilliant idea: Holahan chopped up some Circus Peanuts and sprinkled the marshmallow bits into a bowl of Cheerios. He loved what he tasted, immediately realizing that if he enjoyed the combination of crunchy cereal and soft marshmallows, so would consumers. Once the cereal was developed, noted a General Mills product timeline , Lucky Charms made its first appearance on supermarket shelves back in And while the cereal's formulation has been constantly reinvented over the years, General Mills representative Jim Geoffrion pointed to three key factors that explain why Lucky Charms continues to be an enduring favorite.
Once the product was placed in development, the key element was perfecting the tiny marshmallow bits that would be mixed with the toasted oat cereal. The miniscule marshmallow pieces, BNet Business Network reported, initially came in just four distinct types: pink hearts, orange stars, yellow moons, and green clovers. The unique formulation of Lucky Charms' marshmallows, noted Smithsonian Magazine , was initially created by a team of General Mills food scientists led by Philip Zietlow, and behind many of those delicious little marshmallow shapes lies a patent.
These marshmallow bits came to be called marbits, a moniker that has stuck and continues to be used all these years later. Lucky Charms remained unchanged for a full decade, with the cereal's marbit "gang of four" intact until It was then, reported HuffPost , that a blue diamond was added to the mix.
According to a General Mills spokesperson, the addition of the blue diamond caused sales to spike by 30 percent. Since then there have been an array of different marbits introduced, including horseshoes, whales, snowmen, pots of gold, and even one shaped like the Eiffel Tower. Lucky the Leprechaun has been the Lucky Charms mascot since the product's introduction. Given that there have been countless commercials produced over the course of the product's year history, there have been numerous actors providing the voice of Lucky over the years.
According to the Behind the Voice Actors site, seven different actors have given voice to the character. The actor most associated with Lucky, however, was Arthur Anderson. The same advertising agency that came up with Lucky the Leprechaun nearly killed the little guy off in order to make room for his replacement. According to the Taste of General Mills blog , in the mids Dancer Fitzgerald Sample's Alan Snedeker was tasked with developing a new Lucky Charms mascot, and created a scatterbrained sorcerer dubbed Waldo the Wizard.
Lucky Charms' also floated a new slogan; while Lucky declared, "They're magically delicious! When Waldo was market tested in New England, the new character proved to be more popular than the leprechaun. During that period, both characters were used simultaneously in Lucky Charms advertising campaigns, with Waldo featured in New England and Lucky in the rest of America. At the same time, Snedeker rejigged Lucky to appear "more friendly" in TV commercials.
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