Explanation of the Cinnamon Toast Crunch shrimp fiasco

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Yum?

General Mills

General Mills’ CEO is applauding claims of crustacean tail caught in the packaging process for his popular Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal.

If you’ve ignored all the media in the past 24 hours and haven’t heard: Jensen Karp, musician-producer-personality and husband of Danielle Fishel, the actress who played Topanga on Boy Meets World, images shared on Twitter Monday of what appear to be shrimp tails and other unworthy breakfast debris swimming around a packet of cereal he bought at a big store in the Los Angeles area.

“Based on the information we have now, it is highly unlikely that this happened at a General Mills facility,” General Mills CEO Jeff Harmening said Fourth on CNBC. “So, now, we are working with this consumer to try to find out, more or less, what happened between when he left our docks and when he opened it.”

Harmening’s appearance comes after the incident went viral in recent days, with Karp documenting the negotiation process with the company. This has led to many jokes about shrimp cereals, some nervousness about cereal safety and some people reacting to Karp’s situation with skepticism and even sharing unfavorable personal stories about him. Karp says that after contacting General Mills, the company said the apparent pieces of seafood were more likely globes of unmixed ingredients or the result of someone tampering with the packaging.

Karp it says he is planning to send samples of the non-cereal to the company and, at the same time, to send samples to a third-party laboratory to confirm that it is, in fact, shrimp.

There are two main theories about what is going on here. And, surprisingly, there seems to be evidence for both. As General Mills says (and certainly hopes) it is true, someone (or something) could have tampered with the packaging after it left the company’s production facilities.

This is more than just positive thinking on the part of the company, because Karp himself tweeted that the other bag in the family pack he bought “looks glued (?)” and an image included in the tweet shows what appears to be some kind of transparent tape.

Another theory, put forward by a series of commentators on Twitter, is that at some point in the production process, rodents went into some ingredients for the cereal and stayed there. That could explain photos that Karp shares of what appears to be excrement. “I think it is also important to say that black things – are they cooked (?) INSIDE the square?” he says. Tails of shrimp and other debris fragments can be discarded items collected by these rodents for nesting material.

Talk about an extra unwanted crisis.

It is very strange that a single package of the same product, as reported by Karp, shows possible evidence of product tampering and contamination by cooking. It makes me wonder if the apparent faeces were more compressed in the cereal than cooked. But who knows?

One thing is for sure: a laboratory confirming that the shrimp tails are actually shrimp tails will not solve the mystery of where they came from – unless the laboratory confirms that they are not shrimp tails and are actually pieces remarkably similar to shrimp tails. . sugar.

If that is the case, it seems that nothing really serious has happened here (as long as the other foreign objects are also sugar). So, maybe we’re just a few months away from General Mills taking advantage of the fiasco and launching a limited series of Cinnamon Shrimp Crunch.

“To save your company, Cinnamon Toast Crunch needs to make cereals stylish again,” wrote a Twitter user, and what’s more sophisticated than shrimp? “

I know what result I’m rooting for.

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