Kozy up
Kozy Shack, the Arden Hills, Minn., maker of rice pudding (and tapioca pudding and chocolate pudding), steps up the price point with a set of four Indulgent Recipe puddings, each carrying the description “decadent dessert pudding.” (That tagline helps to distinguish these offerings from main-course and appetizer puddings.)
Mr. Tidbit can’t help noting that the packaging of the Indulgent Recipe four-packs of 3.75-ounce tubs — each is an elegantly dark cardboard sleeve that blends into a bright color highlighting the individual flavor — resembles that of similarly upscale Jell-O Temptations puddings. (The tubs in the Temptations four-packs contain just 3.35 ounces.)
At one discount supermarket, the Kozy Shack Indulgent Recipe four-packs (Chocolate Truffle, Vanilla Bean, Dark Chocolate and — surprise! — Salted Caramel) were $2.79 (18.6 cents per ounce). At the same store, six-packs of four-ounce tubs of Kozy Shack rice pudding and tapioca pudding were $2.89 (12 cents per ounce).
Fiber plenty
Mr. Tidbit hopes he can be excused for thinking that the new-product folks at General Mills’ might eventually run out of additional foodstuffs to market under the now-nearly-universal Fiber One brand. That’s not happening, at least not yet.
The latest additions are Fiber One Cheesecake Bars (strawberry and — surprise! — salted caramel) and two additions to the assortment of Fiber One cookies (crunchy sugar cookies and soft-baked peanut butter cookies), bringing the cookie lineup to six. Mr. Tidbit must say that the degree to which the Cheesecake Bars resemble actual cheesecake is surprising (at least for a fiber bar).
On a separate note, the Cheesecake Bars provide yet another example of a package that is deceptively larger than its contents. The box is 5 1/2 inches wide, 5 1/2 inches tall and about 2 3/8 inches deep. A case might be made that the width and depth are appropriate to hold the five foil-pouched bars (each is somewhat wider than the depth of the box, so they go in diagonally). But the tops of the foil pouches fall about 1 1/4 inches short of the top of the box. And the Cheesecake Bar itself is more than an inch shorter than the foil pouch, so the happy consumer is buying well over 2 inches of empty box.
About the Author
