

“You can’t turn this into a positive and you can’t build brand awareness of this in a good way,” he said. Meyvis said that the company “should’ve taken this seriously right away” and in doing so would have avoided this situation from making headlines and capturing the internet’s attention. He chided the company for the “discrepancy” between the public message sent on the cereal brand’s Twitter account to the private message sent to Karp. “It’s a bad idea not to give customers the benefit of the doubt and you shouldn’t go around accusing them,” Meyvis told CNN Business. (He eventually agreed to ship the box back to General Mills Karp later tweeted an exchange of Twitter private messages appearing to come from the company asking him to send the product back to them - something he originally said he did not want to do as he felt the company’s response saying it was sugar made him “look insane” - as well as a followup email exchange asking him to bring it to local law enforcement if he didn’t want to send it back. Meyvis said the discovery is gross - and that’s “very dangerous for food brands.” However, how Cinnamon Toast Crunch responded was even worse, he said. But for Tom Meyvis, a professor of marketing and consumer behavior at New York University’s Stern School of Business, there’s a lesson to be learned here.

The cereal brand owned by General Mills responded via Twitter to Karp, saying that the shrimp-tail-like objects weren’t seafood, but an “accumulation of the cinnamon sugar that sometimes can occur when ingredients aren’t thoroughly blended.” It added: “We assure you that there’s no possibility of cross contamination with shrimp.”Īdmittedly, it’s a silly story. The back-and-forth quickly devolved into chaos. Can you please send us a DM to collect more details? Thanks!- Cinnamon Toast Crunch March 22, 2021 We’re sorry to see what you found! We would like to report this to our quality team and replace the box. His thousands of followers responded - and so did Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The gross object was tweeted by Los Angeles-based writer Jensen Karp, who said he found pieces of a crustacean in his cereal earlier this week. That’s what everyone thought when they first heard about the saga of the cinnamon-and-sugar encrusted shrimp tail found in a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. “We assure you that there’s no possibility of cross-contamination with shrimp.Disgusting. “It appears to be an accumulation of the cinnamon sugar that sometimes can occur when ingredients aren’t thoroughly blended,” the tweet said, in part. Shortly after, the cereal brand then responded with another tweet, telling Karp that “after further investigation” the company had concluded he did not receive shrimp tails in his cereal. Karp’s claim quickly caught the attention of the Cinnamon Toast Crunch Twitter account, which asked him to message them with more details. Somehow, though, the saga only got weirder from there. I don’t see what there is to complain about here,” Goldman joked. Karp’s tweet went so viral that even celebrities - everyone from Seth Rogen to celebrity chef Duff Goldman - decided to weigh in. “I hope this is not real,” another added. “WHAAAAT? That’s disgusting,” one commenter wrote. Twitter users called the alleged incident “gross” and “unbelievable.” The image, which Karp followed up with more alleged evidence, drew an immediately strong reaction online. Ummmm – why are there shrimp tails in my cereal? (This is not a bit) /tTjiAdrnVp- Jensen Karp March 22, 2021
