TIL Pop-Tarts are now lower quality than the old generic knock offs

I have not but I might have made that mistake in the future. Thanks for the warning. It's so weird that off-brands for everything appeared as cheaper lower quality versions and then the world went to such shit they're now the higher quality version.

How are so many things now worse quality and higher priced than their own knock-offs? They should all be committing Sudoku in shame.

If you can get them, the Clover Valley ones ($1.85 @ Dollar General) are pretty good, although the fig filling is golden rather than brown.

psssst... Nature's Bakery are dope.

Speaking of fig newtons. We started getting dried rosselino or Salem white figs in bulk and just having those instead. So much better than any fig newtons thing.

People in the UK are saying it about Cadbury too. :(

That explains a lot. I used to live the raspberry ones so much and couldn't wait to share them with my two girls.

All I got was, "Dad, these suck."

So I tried one and was just baffled. It did suck. I chalked it up to my taste buds changing, but this makes much more sense.

Chocolate has gotten worse and worse too.

It's also because they're shit. I loved them once, too. They were shit then, too. I just didn't realize how shit this shit was because of the sugar high. Every few years you just cone more to your senses. Shitty chemical sugar foods are worse than any drug.

That's fucking interesting. I'm one too but haven't been back once in five years. Partly because it's hard to travel en famille halfway across the world (but mostly because of the good reasons not to).

What's the vibe like? I hear shit has gotten weird.

Disgusting and artificial is American, both our people and foods.

I never tried them, but I once read their box in a US supermarket and I'm surprised that they could be made lower quality.

It's a lot of childhood marketing associating things like cartoons and commercials for the product. Because they were expensive and sugary, parents would make them a special indigence.

As a child I used to love them when I could get them, then I had a real pastry with jam in the middle never went back. I was so upset about how much better a real part was and why we never have them, when they were basically the same price at the time. But we lived in the county, so an hour-long drive to get them every other day made no sense, either.

Maybe it's just me, but I ran through a lot of typical heavily marketed food items for kids when I was one, and always ended up hungry an hour later. Learned early on how much of that stuff was garbage.

Pastries like that should basically be made from flour, water, sugar, fruit, baking soda, and butter. Pop Tarts are not actually food, though. They have an ingredient list as long as your arm full of disgusting and cheap edible food-like substances.

It helps a bit if you toast them. That's what the "pop" part means.

is there a reason moat European pasteries seem so organic and like they weren't made in a sterile environment?

Pop tarts are infinitely shittier than they were even 5 years ago, it's not just you. I bought one pack last year and never will again. They are trash crackers that feel like some bean counter went "yep still frosted on top, filling in the middle, good to go". Now they are trying to sell "super stuffed" variants too that still don't meet the old standards. Fuck poptarts.

::: spoiler Trash.

:::

Late 40s here so same, it's definitely not nostalgia. I was a chonkey bastard so I'd get the s'mores ones once they came out and eat the crust ring on the outside then pull them open to gorge on the sweet s'mores innards.

There's so little filling now that both halves seem bare, and the things are so thin and brittle they crack into a dozen pieces in the attempt.

That's not exactly true.

Yes, most of it is manufactured by a co-packer. And these co-packers also make similar products for other brands. But each one (usually) has their own recipe. Sometimes the differences are very minor, others can be drastic. Sometimes they have specialty ingredients (e.g. Himalayan sea salt instead of regular salt, or a partner brand). Sometimes the co-packer offers a standard recipe as a starter for the smaller brands.

Historically, the brand-name used a higher-quality recipe, worthy of the higher sale price. Generics would use something cheaper, comfortably taking the lower end of the market. Costco's Kirkland brand is famous for going a step higher than the major brand, which is very unusual for a house brand.

Yeah, the weird part being that the off-brands are now better quality than the name brands. When they suddenly drop in quality to match everything will taste like sawdust and tears.

Marshmallows are cheaper than grains, also are we calling the grains luckies?

Back then I tried an off brand Lucky charms and it had a weird after taste. They're all so much better now. I'm all about those dog food sized bags of Golden Grams and Korn Pops.

I once bought them in a "american sectuon" in a supermarket, because i kept seeing them on tv. I couldn't believe that people would actually eat sweet cardboard and like it.

I think baking tarts is a sex crime.

Ya. I really noticed the recent decline in pringles. As cheap and crappy as they were before, they are noticeably way worse now.

The "hot ones" are good, though. I still prefer the Pringles style Lays buffalo wing flavor, but those are damn hard to find.

If it has "equity" or "capital" in its name you are fucked.

What the fuck is happening to WinCo's bulk food prices though? Ive bought there for decades and it's now more expensive per pound than boxed Quaker oats(General Mills) granola sold in the same store, WinCo!?!

I almost lost my shit last month trying to reconcile how it could happen. Is WinCo doing target enshittification? Is GM reducing gouging?

I've also noticed yogurt pricing is not competitive some times with grocery outlet.

It's like a cracker sandwich with the same amount of filling you'd get by lightly buttering toast.

Dude those things are more sugary than a handful of candy along with minimal nutritional value. They were good like 15+ years ago but the enshittification has fully run its course. I stopped buying them years ago..

I don't like my food raw. You should see how black my m... ok, that started to sound like a sex joke. But really I burn the shit out of meat.

I mean.. unfrosted pop tarts are a thing. The pastry itself is so sweet though that the actual nutritional difference seems pretty minor (something like 5g more of sugar per 2 pack of pop tarts when comparing frosted vs unfrosted strawberry)

The American trick is to dip them in high fructose corn syrup to help wash down the sugar.

You have to have the frosting. There’s so little filling that you can’t taste it, but you need something on the cardboard

They do! They have a strawberry one that doesn’t have frosting and it’s so much better, in my opinion.

https://www.poptarts.com/en_US/products/all-flavors/pop-tarts-unfrosted-strawberry-product.html

Apparently, pop tarts without frosting are a thing... They are probably still really sugary even without the frosting.

They’re now smaller, have less frosting, and have way less filling. The damn things were so flimsy that two of them snapped trying to take them out of the toaster.

I'm partial to the listeria flavor myself

the most toxic additives.

Food sold in the US or Europe, at least, does not have toxic additives. If you're scared of "chemicals", please for the love of the earth, educate yourself.

That's a cool app.

Just read the label on the package?

Since nobody asked, I want a decent vegan Philly roll.

I'm a barbarian, I'll just rip a chunk off of a loaf of bread and microwave it for a few seconds so it's all warm and moist.

Oh, and I cook entire packs of bacon at once so sometimes I'll cram some bacon in there, with some hash browns from the air fryer and microwaved eggs. Just like barbarians used to do.

The frosting started in 1967. It's sort of been a while on that one.

I dunno, Aldi and Lidl in the UK have half decent cola, lemonade and other flavours of fizzy drinks. Their iced tea isn't too bad either.

When the price difference is less than £1 per 2Litre bottle or over £3 for the branded stuff I'll put up with the difference.

Nope. Store brands are better IMO and half the price.

It's short for die-a-betes but the die part sounds scary.

Look man what did I do to you

I just wanna eat breakfast

You people lol

Right, because the rest of the world doesnt have nutella

Oh sorry, I forgot pain au chocolat and danish were invented in the US. Surely no one but filthy Americans eat sugar in the morning. I think pop tarts suck but we've got bigger problems than pastry. If the health care system gave access to preventative medicine it'd go a long way toward fixing shit.

desert

Also, is this you whining about someone's typo in another thread? Maybe shut the fuck up about minor spelling mistakes. Fucking prescriptivists, I swear to fuck. Who do you really think you're helping with those comments, seriously?