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Kraft Reveals Revamped Mac and Cheese, 50M Boxes Later
- anon987 11y agoJesus, people will submit anything for points now
- ordbajsare 11y agoThere are points?
- dave2000 11y agoApart from your comment, it would appear.
- AdmiralAsshat 11y agoThis strategy is how I imagine the "least painful" transition from init to systemd in a distro would go: someone would make the change, tell everyone to update, and then ask if anyone noticed.
- robmccoll 11y agoBut then you'd go to add / remove / change an init script and realize that the world had been completely changed underneath you.
- striking 11y agoAnd your personalized init scripts, for applications not available in the repositories or for applications you want launched in a different way... would just break. I feel like on bootup you'd realize that your work was broken.
- cakes 11y agoI was thinking about this and I guess _maybe_ if you didn't customize anything during boot/init it would work from your distro's install...very golden path thinking there...
- christianmann 11y agoSort of reminds me of Windows.
- ewzimm 11y agoThat actually sounds like the most painful transition possible as scripts would start failing and admins couldn't use their tools anymore. Would be entertaining to watch though.
- oftenwrong 11y agoLinux users tend to be aware of update contents. They read the changelogs, review the list of packages that will be updated, etc. I've been using a mac at my new job, and a dialog box popped up today asking if I wanted to update. The options were something like "Not now" and "Update all". How am I supposed to know if I want to update if I don't even know what's going to be updated?
- draw_down 11y agoThat would be like if Kraft replaced the macaroni with nails without mentioning it, and then later asked if anyone noticed.
- salgernon 11y agoWell, some of us connoisseurs we're prepared for this change since 2013: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/11/01/242412024/kraft-dims-that-mac-and-cheese-artificially-orange-glow This isn't as radical a transition as "New Coke", and we haven't had to raid stores to build a stockpile like we did in the early 80s.
- dspillett 11y agoFor people who don't know the "New Coke" story, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuMxXw9TeE4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuMxXw9TeE4 is an interesting watch. Americans take their soda very seriously (or at least did in the 80s). It makes the hoo-ha over Kraft buying Cadbury, a British staple similar to how Coke is/was an American one, and the changes they made since (some of them within days of the purchase despite having promised the government otherwise to get the deal to go ahead) look like a storm in a tea-cup.
- mfoy_ 11y agoInteresting idea, I guess a tech comparison would be revamping the server side code considerably but not making an announcement so users wouldn't think they had to be on the lookout for bugs / quirks that weren't originally present. If you test well you could 100% overhaul the back end with not a single end user the wiser. I suppose if you announced a "major overhaul" scheduled for some time then users may be wary or hesitant to engage with the platform thinking hat they should expect intermittent outages or broken features.
- hultner 11y agoI've done this, went from a Windows Server C# based backend to Linux servers with a completely new backend in Java. Nothing changed on the frontend and no announcement, some users gave feedback that the application seemed snappier though but they were never aware of what happened "under the hood".
- thrownaway2424 11y agoThis is known in software as the "dark launch".
- rplnt 11y agoI don't remember new Pepsi, but new Coke had a huge backslash which lead to pulling the product off the market, reversing back to original formula. And if I remember correctly, this original Coke, dubbed Coca-Cola Classic saw much better sales than the same coke did before that. Making people wonder if the new coke fiasco wasn't intentional.
- jhawk28 11y agoThey didn't actually use the original formula. They used the opportunity to switch from Cane sugar to Corn Syrup. Since people didn't have the ability to taste the difference any more, no one noticed. This let them cut the cost of a major ingredient which then translated into profit. They gained a LOT more from the failed product.
- mywittyname 11y agoAnd decades later, we all still talk about it. Classic Coke is so awesome that it cannot be changed because EVERYBODY WILL REVOLT! Achieving that level of mythos about a product is an astonishing accomplishment.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoThey revolt if they know its happening. Even today Coke has lots of different recipes. A bottle is very different from a fountain machine at a restaurant for instance. And folks don't get out the torches and pitchforks.
- rocky1138 11y agoI'm fairly certain this change came to Canada first but unlike the USA, it was announced. Kraft launched a new version of Kraft Dinner (what you Yanks call "Mac and Cheese") with the preservatives replaced by natural things last year. I thought it tasted fine and was happy that it's even a little healthier.
- mirimir 11y agoMaybe the preservatives were better for you ;)
- runin2k1 11y agoThere was a change.org petition by "Food Babe" to get this changed due to a lot of bunk arguments. Replacing a tiny amount of a very common food dye is not going to affect the healthiness in any substantial way.
- JohnTHaller 11y agoFood Babe: "When your body is in the air, at a seriously high altitude, your body under goes some serious pressure. Just think about it – Airplanes thrive in places we don’t. You are traveling in a pressurized cabin, and when your body is pressurized, it gets really compressed!" That line from one of her articles sums up her thought process perfectly.
- parennoob 11y agoI agree that Food Babe makes a lot of rather silly arguments "That ingredient in Subway bread is also used in car tires!", etc. but she has drawn attention to some unnecessary additive choices (like 4-Mel in Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes), which I think is helpful. Even if the additive is not harmful, as a consumer, it's good to have more knowledge about what Starbucks puts in their drinks. Having watchdogs like the Food Babe keeps companies a bit more on their toes about the health impacts of their additives than they would be otherwise.
- 11y ago
- kabdib 11y ago... and this is why people with severe allergies always always always read the ingredients list, even if the packaging has not changed. And always carry emergency medication.
- Godel_unicode 11y agoI feel like that kind of comparison is a good candidate for a side project. Take picture, OCR, compare to old list, turn red if it's different
- reustle 11y agoWould be a cool app project. "Scan" each label as you put it in your cart, and see if it rejects it or not
- toomuchtodo 11y agoThe problem is, the ingredients can change without the UPC code changing. You would need manufacturers to purchase and use unique UPC codes for each version of their food formulations.
- gkop 11y agoNeither parent nor grandparent references UPC. Grandparent references the list of ingredients.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoSorry about that! I didn't assume someone would suggest having a mobile device OCR an ingredients label, versus looking up a UPC code tied to an ingredients list and groking for your allergies. One is easy, the other is hard.
- cbhl 11y agoOCR isn't that hard, just expensive. You do a first pass with an algorithm, and then use Mechanical Turk to correct for errors.
- nyangosling 11y agoI think this story is actually a pretty incredible one. Just logistically it's a very interesting story that they were able to keep their collective corporate mouth shut--and even though it seems they're gearing up to milk the marketing effort now, that they did this without immediate payout in terms of brand marketing is surprising. And it's not like we're talking about a processed food brand with a million variants on the shelf either--we're talking an iconic, one-note Kraft dinner. I'd inquire about the taste, if it's any different, etc, but I haven't had Kraft in, uh, a long ass time.
- bjterry 11y agoIt wasn't a secret, it was fully announced it just didn't have a media blitz associated with it. For example, it was reported on in the Washington Post[1]. 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/21/kraft-mac-cheese-just-got-duller-you-can-thank-or-blame-the-food-babe/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/2...
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoThat agrees with the OP. Still, its not 'fully announced' if they don't have a 'media blitz' - its called a soft launch. In the end almost nobody remembered it was going to happen; almost nobody noticed.
- EGreg 11y agoThat raises questions about how much a company would have to do to qualify as a media blitz.
- cdash 11y agoIt was semi announced that they planned on changing the recipe but at the time of the announcement that had not happened yet. It did no roll out until December and they did not announce that. Of course from the articled submitted they said people were already saying that could taste the difference before the change was ever made.
- 11y ago
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoMaybe they worried too much. Even though the change was written on the box, nobody noticed or commented. That's how much people cared.
- zodPod 11y agoThis was pretty genius! I'm looking forward to trying the "new formula" even though it won't taste any different haha
- forrestthewoods 11y agoPlot Twist: They haven't actually changed anything and will silently roll out the REAL change 6 months from now. (Not really. But that'd be a cool story too.)
- kingosticks 11y agoAre Kraft and Mondelez the same company? They now own British chocolate company Cadbury and have received a lot of criticism for changing recipes there (amongst other things). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/features/7-ways-cadbury-has-been-trashed0/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/features/7-ways-ca...
- wnevets 11y agoMondelez bought kraft iirc.
- commiebob 11y agoIt went something like this - my memory is a little hazy as this happened a few years ago: Kraft at the time owned Nabisco and had all of it's "snack" brands under the Nabisco umbrella. Mondelez and Kraft merged and then split all the "snack" brands off under Mondelez (this included Cadbury because Kraft had already taken them over). Then 3G capital came in and merged Kraft and Heinz and spun Mondelez completely off into its own company - all the Cadbury/Nabisco brands are under the Mondelez umbrella and Kraft/Heinz has the non-snack stuff.
- anexprogrammer 11y agoKraft renamed themselves Mondelez after spinning off grocery brands who now use the Kraft name - Philadelphia cheese etc. Mondelez are well on the way to destroying the Cadbury brand here. One of the things Kraft made a big deal of during the takeover was promising to keep a particular UK plant open. 7 days after finalisation they announced the plant's closure. Creme Eggs are now revolting, It's not even Cadbury choclate any more, but some sugary cheap fake chocolate. Being egg shaped, they were commonly sold in packs of 6, now sold in 5s - same price. They're also markedly smaller. They've fiddled with most products, generally made them noticeably worse, and shrunk the sizes of nearly everything. I buy other makes these days.
- logfromblammo 11y agoBear in mind that British Cadbury's, after reformulation, is still better than American Cadbury's. Chicago may be the candy capital of the world, but let's just say that not all innovation in confectionery is to the ultimate good of the consumer. I don't know how, exactly, it has come to this, but I believe many of the chocolate-like products sold in the US are now labeled as "chocolate candy", as they no longer even meet any of the American legal definitions for chocolate. It makes it really easy to adhere to a low-sugar diet when all the "chocolate" around you is junk. Be glad if your chocolate still has actual cocoa butter in it, instead of coconut oil, palm oil, palm kernel oil, or shea butter. Or even sunflower or safflower oils!
- dpeck 11y agoCanadians are anxiously awaiting the shipping of Kraft Klassic :)
- npatrick04 11y agoI actually noticed a couple of months ago that it now takes 5-6 minutes to cook instead of ~4 to get the same consistency. That threw me off since I am the primary mac&cheese maker for my kids.
- dhimes 11y agoWhoever thought of this must be a parent. This is brilliant, and exactly like changes you make when you feed picky eaters (and they probably know that they are a staple food for picky eaters).
- symfoniq 11y agoHaving young children, there's almost always a box of macaroni and cheese in the house. My kids, who fancy themselves mac & cheese connoisseurs, started complaining about the taste of Kraft a couple of months ago. So now when Kraft advertises on TV that they changed their mac & cheese and nobody noticed, my eight- and six-year-old just roll their eyes. I suppose the upside is, they're already learning that you can't believe advertising.
- dunham 11y agoMy wife and kid are pretty happy with Annie's. Might be worth trying if you're looking for another brand. (The only stuff I eat these days is homemade, typically gruyère-based, but we keep Annie's on hand in case we don't have leftovers for lunch.)
- gruyere 11y ago>The only stuff I eat these days is homemade, typically gruyère-based Bravo.
- ff10 11y agocreated: 5 minutes ago :-(
- douche 11y agoI've never been all that impressed by Annies (weirdly enough, I remember this being a view bordering on heresy when I was in college...), it struck me as being too expensive and too fussy to make. Adult-Kraft dinner is too easy to make - substitute real macaroni, and cheddar instead of the florescent orange cheese dust, same milk and butter. I mix in some American slices or Velveeta-esque process cheese, since I think that gives it a little better consistency, but you can leave that out if you have an abhorrence for tasty, jello-like cheese products. My guilty pleasure is a big bowl of mac and cheese, with cubed fried Spam mixed in.
- maxerickson 11y ago
- anexprogrammer 11y agoI'm more than a little surprised it's so successful. Macaroni & cheese barely takes any longer to make properly than to warm up a pan of bought. OK, add a few mins if you want to grill it with cheese topping, which improves it no end :)
- kingnothing 11y agoThere's a decent amount of effort involved in making a roux base for a cheese sauce compared to squeezing a packet of cheese-product into a pan. It's not a huge effort, but it's still there if you aren't accustomed to cooking much more than frozen meals and prepackaged food.
- erikpukinskis 11y agoYou can't leave 8 pans of prepared Macaroni & cheese in your pantry for when you need them.
- wmeredith 11y agoIn case anyone else actually wanted to see the commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3eFbpyNRiQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3eFbpyNRiQ
- kieranhunt 11y agoI must recommend the fantastic YouTube series, BoxMac: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CLH1Tx2EyXE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CLH1Tx2EyXE
- VeryVito 11y agoI doubt there's a soccer mom in the world who didn't know this had happened already; my wife had been expecting it for months when it finally switched. Other manufacturers are doing similar things. In fact, Trix Cereal has quietly switched away from artificial colors recently, and other General Mills "kids" cereals are expected to follow suit soon.
- pkamb 11y agoGlad to see Craig Kilborn getting some work.
- PaulHoule 11y agoDo they still put Milk Protein Concentrate in it?
- jedberg 11y agoWe did the same thing at reddit when we upgraded the search system. First we put a little survey on every search result that said "Are you satisfied with these results? yes/no". After we collected enough data, we changed the entire search backend out, but told no one. After a few months of collecting data showing the satisfaction go from ~70% to ~90%, we made a blog post explaining what we did. Here's the real kicker though that makes it different from Kraft -- we didn't say that we had done it months ago, so we kept getting comments about how it was "so much better this week vs. last week". We did that a few times. When we moved the site to EC2, we announced it months after the fact, and people would claim to have noticed the "sudden change". It's an interesting look into the human psyche.
- mbesto 11y agoMake no mistake about it, this is clearly a marketing ploy by Kraft's ad agency. They are battling the minds of consumers who are (as of recent) continually seeing companies change ingredients and then be marketed to because it's "preservatives are bad...now with less preservatives!", with an undesirable side effect of "hmmm, but it tastes different". Coke Zero is a great example of this effect. I'm not so sure Reddit's system is that similar. Reddit had a serious issue with search functionality not reaching the desired effect, and was easily circumvented by using Google search directly on reddit. In reddit's case it was about completing a task and reaching a goal ("I now can search for something and it works"), for Kraft this is about perception and desire ("This tastes good!").
- draw_down 11y ago> Make no mistake about it, this is clearly a marketing ploy by Kraft's ad agency. Ad agencies doing marketing? Those bastards!
- jedberg 11y ago> In reddit's case it was about completing a task and reaching a goal ("I now can search for something and it works"), for Kraft this is about perception and desire ("This tastes good!"). That's a fair assessment in regards to the search example, but the move to EC2 example is completely analogous. If we had announced the change when it happened people would have said it was bad right away, but by announcing it after the fact we could point out that no one noticed until we said something (which we did in the comments after they said they noticed something).
- mikestew 11y agoThis might (or might not) work for Kraft, but let me tell a cautionary tale. Those that hang on my every word have read me mention that I train dogs at the local animal shelter. Some dogs need to be taught how to be civilized members of society before adoption, so that's what my wife and I help with. Food is a great motivator, and we used to use these logs of dog food (Natural Balance, for those that care). Chop 'em up into tiny little cubes, makes a great and inexpensive training treat. Dogs love them. Well, dogs used to love them. You see, Natural Balance changed their formula without telling anyone. I'm going to guess that the most common use for Natural Balance dog food is to make treats, not a meal for dogs. The new formula crumbles when you try to cut it, and here's the important part: dogs won't eat it. So Natural Balance dog food is no longer fit for the most common purpose I see in personal observation. No trainer, pro or amateur, that I know of uses it anymore. The hoity-toity major pet food chain in Seattle no longer carries it. No worries, Red Barn makes a tasty equivalent, so we use that now. But here's the kicker: even if Natural Balance pulled a Coca-Cola and put the old formula back, they've still lost us for an indefinite period (if not permanently). Why? Because we'd never know. We found an adequate substitute, Natural Balance is no longer on our radar, and it's not like The Dog Food Blog is in my RSS so I'd know when NB came to their senses. One might get away with this with people food, as kids are more likely to bug Daddy with "but I want Kraft!" than a dog is to bug their handler with "What's this Red Barn crap? I want Natural Balance!" But if kids won't eat it, as implied by other comments, then Dad might try another brand, the kids love it even more than Kraft, and Kraft just falls off a family's radar. Because it seems to me that Kraft, as with Coke before them, assumes a brand loyalty that might or might not exist.
- dustinmoorenet 11y agoThey did this because yellow #5 and #6 are banned in other countries. It is still a box of processed food. http://www.examiner.com/article/kraft-mac-and-cheese-ingredients-banned-outside-u-s http://www.examiner.com/article/kraft-mac-and-cheese-ingredi...
- jrs235 11y agoSo apparently (I thought Heinz, that was what the website mentions) Kraft (they're who responded to my feedback with nothing but boiler marketing "cost of ingredients" response) removed the Golden Flavor Nugget from Wyler's Mrs. Grass Soup Mix. This is what that soup was KNOWN for! The Golden Nugget! They got rid of it! Raise the price and keep your differentiator. In my feedback I told them I was returning several unopened boxes to the store since I bought/buy their soup because of the golden egg. I returned the unopened boxes. "Dear Mr. [my name] , Thank you for taking the time to contact us regarding Mrs. Grass Homestyle Noodle & Vegetable Soups. In an effort to continue offering a better product to our consumer, we've removed the Golden Egg Flavor Ball from our Mrs. Grass Homestyle Noodle & Vegetable Soups. The Golden Egg Flavor Ball will no longer be reflected on the packaging. One reason for package changes is to consolidate and reduce packaging. When we're able to do this, it benefits all of us as well as the environment. We also change our packaging in an effort to bring quality products to our consumers at the most affordable price. We all know that prices are increasing on everything from gasoline and corn to automobiles and houses. As costs go up, companies often find that they must raise prices to maintain high quality. The alternative to raising the price of any given product is to offer the product in a slightly smaller size. When we reduce the size of a product, it allows us to offer the product to our consumer at the best affordable price point. I appreciate you sharing your concerns with us. I will be sure to forward your comments to the Marketing and Production staff. It is our goal to continue to offer a variety of high-quality foods at the lowest possible cost to consumers. Thank you for contacting us and please add our site to your favorites and visit us again soon! Sincerely, Julian Franklin Director, Consumer Relations" http://www.wylers.com/Gdetails/mrs_grass_home.aspx http://www.wylers.com/Gdetails/mrs_grass_home.aspx
- junto 11y agoI really don't get why Americans are so drawn to such a nasty processed food. Italians must cringe at the sight of such an abomination.