Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kraft Reveals Revamped Mac and Cheese, 50M Boxes Later

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 192 posts

Re: Kraft Reveals Revamped Mac and Cheese, 50M Boxes Later

#71

Post by abawany »

protomyth wrote: post #17
rplnt wrote: post #7

I don't remember new Pepsi, but new Coke had a huge backslash which lead to pulling the product off the market, reversing back to original formula. And if I remember correctly, this original Coke, dubbed Coca-Cola Classic saw much better sales than the same coke did before that. Making people wonder if the new coke fiasco wasn't intentional.

Pepsi changed the formula for Diet Pepsi in Aug 2015. The change was mainly to remove the aspartame and substitute Splenda. Some folks are very unimpressed.

I just bought many cases of the new Diet Pepsi with sucralose after learning of this change. I found the protests regarding the change from aspartame to sucralose to be hilarious: in my opinion Diet Pepsi used to be the worst tasting Pepsi and the move to sucralose seems to have improved the flavor considerably AFAICT.

Re: Kraft Reveals Revamped Mac and Cheese, 50M Boxes Later

#72

Post by rangibaby »

themodelplumber wrote: post #29
rplnt wrote: post #7

I don't remember new Pepsi, but new Coke had a huge backslash which lead to pulling the product off the market, reversing back to original formula. And if I remember correctly, this original Coke, dubbed Coca-Cola Classic saw much better sales than the same coke did before that. Making people wonder if the new coke fiasco wasn't intentional.

> new Coke had a huge backslash Sadly no appropriate MS-DOS jokes come to mind

Rambling ahead: the spot occupied by \ is the ¥ mark on Japanese keyboards. I mention it because a Windows 98 toaster I used for Myspace and transferring songs to my iPod displayed paths like this: C:¥foo¥bar¥. Which reminds me of another adventure:

The Japanese keyboard I use requires pressing shift to get a tilde (the tilde spot is occupied by a key to switch input methods on some keyboards and nothing on others).

Tilde opens the console in Doom 3, and it didn't like having it on a shifted character, and there was no way of rebinding the key. Long story short, I had to change the key in the source and recompile it to something else. Thanks id for open sourcing your games :-)

Re: Kraft Reveals Revamped Mac and Cheese, 50M Boxes Later

#73

Post by ksherlock »

brianmersenne wrote: post #50
jhawk28 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't actually use the original formula. They used the opportunity to switch from Cane sugar to Corn Syrup. Since people didn't have the ability to taste the difference any more, no one noticed. This let them cut the cost of a major ingredient which then translated into profit. They gained a LOT more from the failed product.

The sweetener isn't part of the Coca-Cola formula (or more specifically, isn't part of the Coca-Cola concentrate). Coca-Cola provides unsweetened concentrate to independent bottlers, and the bottlers add high fructose corn syrup, sugar, or both during the bottling process. Some US Coca-Cola bottlers still only use sugar for sweetener.

Ahh, that's interesting. I remember Coke (KO) bought out the US distribution/bottling from Coca Cola Enterprises (CCE) in 2010 but Wikipedia says 5-10% of US Coke is still bottled by a handful of independent bottlers.

Allegedly, Kosher For Passover Coke (which should be available soon if not already) uses sugar.

Re: Kraft Reveals Revamped Mac and Cheese, 50M Boxes Later

#74

Post by anexprogrammer »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #56
Godel_unicode wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like that kind of comparison is a good candidate for a side project. Take picture, OCR, compare to old list, turn red if it's different

If anyone actually starts this project, be sure to record two more data points: - price of product - food mass of product Those vary invisibly all the time, and it'd be great to have a record of it.

And records the congolmerate that actually owns the brand.

So many food brands are now just meaningless words in someone's brand portfolio. Especially silly when the two main competitors for an item turn out to now be owned by the same parent and rationalised to be made in the same factory.

They get traded around like football cards.

Re: Kraft Reveals Revamped Mac and Cheese, 50M Boxes Later

#75

Post by kale »

Coincoin wrote: post #52
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They revolt if they know its happening. Even today Coke has lots of different recipes. A bottle is very different from a fountain machine at a restaurant for instance. And folks don't get out the torches and pitchforks.

Yeah, I don't see how it's possible for all fountains to get the exact same syrup and gas concentrations. Especially with ice and temperature also being factors.

They use different sweeteners in bottled Diet Coke and fountain Diet Coke. Bottled Diet Coke uses aspartame, while fountain uses a combination (one being AceK, can't remember the other(s)).

Re: Kraft Reveals Revamped Mac and Cheese, 50M Boxes Later

#76

Post by jerf »

eveningcoffee wrote: post #36
jerf wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since I've discovered I've had celiac (the real deal) ~6 years ago, I've read a lot more ingredient labels than I used to, and I can vouch for the fact that food formulations change more than you'd expect without fanfare. For all that you might find "gluten free!" splattered all over a lot of things, I can tell you there have also been a lot of foods that have silently gone gluten-free over the years, along with tryi…

I can tell you there have also been a lot of foods that have silently gone gluten-free over the years, along with trying to minimize their use of the other major allergens. Good find! But as have been indicated here http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35727244 , this may be counterproductive.

Possibly so. My gluten sensitivity is worse than my father's. Why? Environment? Different genes having slightly different effects? Heck if I know.

But at this point in my life, it also no longer matters for me. It is certainly the case that I must avoid gluten now. And, alas, to the extent that it matters for my children, they're almost certainly also going to be biologically-grown-up before we have any solid answers either. In the meantime I just do my best for them.

Re: Kraft Reveals Revamped Mac and Cheese, 50M Boxes Later

#77

Post by symfoniq »

Having young children, there's almost always a box of macaroni and cheese in the house.

My kids, who fancy themselves mac & cheese connoisseurs, started complaining about the taste of Kraft a couple of months ago.

So now when Kraft advertises on TV that they changed their mac & cheese and nobody noticed, my eight- and six-year-old just roll their eyes. I suppose the upside is, they're already learning that you can't believe advertising.

Re: Kraft Reveals Revamped Mac and Cheese, 50M Boxes Later

#80

Post by parennoob »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #55
runin2k1 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a change.org petition by "Food Babe" to get this changed due to a lot of bunk arguments. Replacing a tiny amount of a very common food dye is not going to affect the healthiness in any substantial way.

Food Babe: "When your body is in the air, at a seriously high altitude, your body under goes some serious pressure. Just think about it – Airplanes thrive in places we don’t. You are traveling in a pressurized cabin, and when your body is pressurized, it gets really compressed!" That line from one of her articles sums up her thought process perfectly.

I agree that Food Babe makes a lot of rather silly arguments "That ingredient in Subway bread is also used in car tires!", etc. but she has drawn attention to some unnecessary additive choices (like 4-Mel in Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes), which I think is helpful. Even if the additive is not harmful, as a consumer, it's good to have more knowledge about what Starbucks puts in their drinks.

Having watchdogs like the Food Babe keeps companies a bit more on their toes about the health impacts of their additives than they would be otherwise.

Post reply on HN