"Hamburger Helper" news and stories

In ancient times, food was marketed primarily by "hunger." But in the modern era, it's not enough that we eat our food, we must also emotionally bond with it. This partly explains the enduring appeal of food mascots, those bright, colorful, affable characters who beckon us to consume.

In many cases, we choose a product simply because we have a bizarre attachment to the cartoon that represents it. There is no shame in trusting, say, a paranoid Leprechaun with a powerful marshmallow lust more than one's own family. These 10 icons are the awesomest in the pantheon of cheap food branding.

Recently General Mills, the maker of Hamburger Helper, announced that they were going to do their part to save the planet by straightening out the noodles in boxes of Hamburger Helper. Their thinking was that smoother noodles will take up less packaging because they settle together more easily. That will in turn make it possible for them to make the boxes smaller and then move more HH in each shipment. Problem solved!

The folks over at the Environmental News Network have a bone to pick with General Mills. They say that tweaking the shape of the noodles will not have a significant impact on the health of the environment. ENN argues that until large companies like General Mills take a holistic look at what they make, how they make it and what they make it with, they won't have more than a drop of impact in the bucket of sustainability.

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You had to work late. The traffic on the commute home was horrible. You're tired. You're hungry. But you've got to get dinner for the family on the table now. What do you do?

You could resort to picking up a bucket from the Colonel on your way home, or call for pizza delivery, but you're better than that, right? Apparently, you are, according to a study by UCLA's Center on Everyday Lives of Families that did the first academic study to track American families moment by moment as they make dinner. They had expected to see a lot more takeout in working families but what they really saw was that 70% of the households in the study cooked at home. However, these "home-cooked" meals heavy reliance on "convenience foods."

However, these convenience foods, things that augment home cooking, didn't necessarily make dinner preparation any faster or easier. In fact, the difference in time to prepare dinner between a household that relied on convenience foods like boxed mixes, packaged vegetables, and pre-made stirfries and a household that made everything from scratch, was not statistically significant.

Really? You mean all this time I've been using Hamburger Helper, and I could have made lasagna from scratch in the same amount of time?!?!

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AdJab just posted a great list of their top eight male mascots in the advertising world, and poking around over there, I noticed that all of them, with the exception of Mr. Clean, are from food products. Guess that goes to show how important branding, marketing, and advertising are to consumer-packaged foods.

AdJab picks Orville Redenbacher, Sonny the Cuckoo Bird (cuckoo for CoCo Puffs!), Snap, Crackle and Pop! (they come as a package deal), Charlie the Starkist Tuna, Sugar Bear, Hamburger Helper Hand (which always freaked me out because he doesn't have five fingers), and Colonel Sanders.

Who are the food mascot "men" you remember?