Flashback: 1985 Kellogg’s Cereal Promotions
Remember sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of sugar-coated breakfast goodness and pouring over every inch of that cereal box to see what kind of cool gadget you could beg your parent to send away for?
It was always the same scenario. First, you had to save up enough UPCs or coupons from the box. Then, you had to wait for your parent to write a check or go to the post office to get a money order and a stamp. And the worst part of it all was having to wait! It was always four to six weeks for the item to come in the mail. Why couldn’t the company just put the prize right there in the box instead of making an eight-year-old kid wait a lifetime for it to show up?
Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes was always one of my all-time favorite cereals—and still is, more than 50 years later. When the company put an offer for a specialedition Hot Wheels car on the box, I became a cereal-eatin’ fool! The cashier at the grocery store must have thought I was buying cereal for my neighborhood— kind of like the time there was a Hot Wheels Spam promotion and I filled the shopping cart with cans of Spam...and I don’t even like Spam!
Kellogg’s introduced Sugar Frosted Flakes in 1952, but in 1983, it decided to drop the word “sugar” from the name. Somewhere around the summer of 1985, Kellogg’s decided that it needed to offer an incentive to get parents to buy more boxes of Frosted Flakes for their kids. Drop the word “sugar” from one of Kellogg’s best-selling cereal brands for 30 years and it ends up needing a little sales help two years later? Coincidence or not, Kellogg’s loss became Hot Wheels collectors’ gain.
There were three different castings that were available from Kellogg’s in 1985 for this promotion. They were the Corvette Stingray, Super Van, and Turbo Streak.