Everything You Probably Didn’t Want to Know About Cheerios
A just for fun example of humor and fun informational writing
More than 80 years ago, in the summer of 1941, the General Mills Company of Minnesota introduced a new cartoon character mascot destined to disappear in a scant couple of years. Her name? Cheeri O’Leary — now guess what product she hawked?
Red-headed and pig-tailed, with freckles galore, the kiddo represented Cheerioats on cereal boxes and in Sunday comic strips, according to Generalmills.com. People loved her. Cheeri O’Leary provided bio info about movie stars on the back of the first boxes. But General Mills was worried that the cereal wouldn’t catch on, so they spent four years experimenting with logos, mascots, box designs, shapes, and flavors.
And the rest is cereal history
CheeriOats were introduced as a “ready-to-eat” oat cereal. The name emphasized the main ingredient to differentiate from numerous other cereals. Quaker Oats took offense to the name pretty quickly, claiming it infringed on their trademark. There was no lawsuit — General Mills changed the name to Cheerios.
The cereal designers looked at about 10 shapes until they chose the small round. To make it, they forced batter into round dies and then shoved them through a puffing gun that heated the batter till dry and shot it out at hundreds of miles an hour. Voila, light, puffy little Os became the top cereal seller and the first finger food of most American children.
I remember sitting at the breakfast table as a kid and reading Cheerios boxes till I was nearly late for school. Those boxes were never boring and never had commercials on them. They were cool. My favorite breakfast was Cheerios in two-by-four-inch boxes lined with wax paper. We made a capital letter I-shaped cut in the box front with a sharp knife, opened the flaps, and poured milk right in.
In a few years, Cheerios became a General Mills top seller. Today, in the 21st Century, Cheerios still dominates. Some stats call it the number one seller, some say number two, but annual sales are about $450M or 140 million boxes (source: Zippia). The maker is now Cereal Partners Worldwide, a joint Nestlé/General Mills venture.
Cheerios fun facts
There are at least a dozen flavor varieties.
In celebration of Y2K, Cheerios had a special addition called Millenios, brown sugar-flavored with tiny numeral 2s added so you could have 2000 spelled out in your milk. I never saw them, did you?
In 2021, limited-edition CheeriOats boxes were sold with the original name and design.
The cereal’s name is a cultural icon. Physicists call floating objects attracting to each other the Cheerio effect.
Cheerios boxes used to have little treasures inside. Remember digging barehanded through a fresh box to snag the toy before your siblings did? These are some of the premiums kids got out of Cheerios boxes in the past:
Lone Ranger items
Secret agent microscope
Night-flight goggles
3-D comics
Confederate money (reproductions, most likely)
Airport set (34 pieces!)
Stratosphere kite
I’m surprised there was room for the Os. Cheeri O’Leary has gone to the great bowl of milk in the sky, but I doubt many people haven’t consumed at least a hundred boxes of those puffy, floaty little circles.