Freebie

Does a bear exploit in the woods? 

Years ago, in grad school in Boston, my boss had two teenage daughters at home. They ate a lot of cold cereal. One day, I was passing through their kitchen and remarked on the purple milk in the bowl. The dye was leaching from the Grape 'n' Raspberry Froot Loops. It was a cue for a characteristically irascible rant at General Foods who would make an out-there new variety of product and budget $1million for advertising and still turn a profit by selling 2 million packets of Avocado Chili Cornflakes at $2 the pop. Even if no cereal packet ever got finished and nobody bought a second packet, because bleugh! And next month another wild option would be kited to consumers of America

The market is skewed because the end-consumers are either children who bully their parents into purchasing what the kids see on daytime TV or youngsters living at home who have a grunt job at a car-wash or McDonalds but no mortgage to pay. Adults tend towards, like, real food.

Dau.I was down for the bank.hol weekend and presented me with an apposite card [R]. She had lifted it, with permission, from a grown-assed chap at work who had been snacking on 'healthy' Bear Yoyos. Bear Snacks was founded in 2009 in the UK and you know that adults [except as commissariat and catering supplies] were not the target demographic; they encourage feedback fr'instance through the following media

• Give us a growl bear.uk@bearsnacks.com
• BEAR,  The Big Cave, Deepest Darkest Woods, PO Box 1311, St. Albans, UK
  

I guess you cannot fault them as a chemical factory of additives. There are very few packaged 'foods' which have fewer ingredients than my sourdough bread.

• Apples (65.8%), Pears (32.9%), Strawberries (1%), Black Carrot Extract (0.3%)
• Apples (40%), Pears (40%), Mangos (20%)
• Apples (62.3%), Pears (31.1%), Blackcurrants(6.6%)
• + each packet includes a 'collectible' card featuring something similar to Bob the Blob [see above]
  

Apart from the performative bonhomie equivalent to children's TV from the 1970s, my gripe is the cost. The standard aliquot is 5 Yoyos [one for each school lunch M - F] each weighing 20g for €3.29 . . . that's €32.90/kg! which surely puts them outside the budget of poor families actually feeling food inflation. I guess ordinary struggling folk by-pass the aisle packaged products promoting "health" and buy, like, actual apples at 10x for €1.60. That's about ¼ the price and includes actual apple pips that you can spit across the lunchroom at your pal Jimmy.