They’ve taken another piece of my childhood away, and this time they’ve gone too far. Frito-Lay, the chip behemoth that owns like 99.8% of the potato chip market and is owned by Pepsi, has decided to no longer put the toy surprise inside packages of Cracker Jacks and is instead replacing them with a QR code for an app for some baseball themed games. I’m sure that the apps will also feature coupons and ads for Doritos and Pepsi, but that’s surely just a coincidence.
Years ago they stopped putting sticks of gum in with baseball cards (the gum was hard as a rock but you still looked forward to it) and now they’re taking away the joy of finding a tiny plastic whistle or some other tiny toy that occasionally was actually useful and gave you the feeling of winning the lottery, if even for just a moment. The protesters are already mobilizing on Facebook, and perhaps this will turn out to be a fiasco and the prizes are restored, but for now, it’s a sad day in snack food history. “Caramel coated popcorn, peanuts and a prize, that’s what you get with Cracker Jacks!” Not any more. They killed the jingle too.
You’re going to have to work a little harder to get your Cracker Jack prize.
What do you get in Cracker Jack? A QR code, apparently.
The “Prize Inside” will no longer actually be inside the box, Frito-Lay has announced. Like so many other aspects of our lives, the prize will be digitized.
Download an app, scan a sticker inside the Cracker Jack box and access “baseball-inspired mobile digital experiences,” the company said, launching the change ahead of baseball season. The packaging and logo will also be “contemporized.”
On the Cracker Jack Facebook page, commenters were not impressed:
“An app is not a prize,” one quipped.
“The backbone of Cracker Jack has always been a young child’s treasure hunt……SHAME ON YOU,” another proclaimed.
“Wow. In all my nearly 56 years on this planet, I have never been so disappointed in a product,” said one woman.
Yet another wrote, simply: “Forget you.”
A Facebook community with more than 1,000 likes is calling on Frito-Lay to “Put the PRIZE back in Cracker Jack.”