Company: Nabisco
Years: 1968-????
This has to be hands down one of the more interesting ideas I've ever seen for a breakfast Cereal. It was the late 60's, and the country was all about free love, drugs, and doing what felt good. And what felt good to one Nabisco employee was to eat ice cream for breakfast. Not just any ice cream, mind you, but freeze dried ice cream. "THE FUTURE IS NOW!!!!" I imagine employees chanting as they carefully formulated this concoction known as Rice Cream Flakes, the smash hit from Nabisco that was going to be the future of breakfast for kids and adults across this great nation of ours.
The cereal itself was a rice cereal, but the kicker is that they covered the flakes with this Freeze Dried Ice cream they purchased from Oregon Freeze Dried Foods. There were 3 varieties, Chocolate, Vanilla, and Strawberry. Everyone smiled and cheered! VIVA LA ICE CREAM!!!! Let's put it into mass production! USA! USA!USA!
Oh, 2 small problems. It's 1968, and there aren't that many companies out there producing the volume of Freeze Dried Ice Cream that Nabisco needed for mass production of this. And the one company they had been using, Oregon Freeze Dried Foods, was shutting down.
So what should have been a national smash hit in the cereal game turned out to be nothing more then a successful regional test market that left people wanting more, but there was no more to be had. None more Rice Cream Flakes.
Anyone else thinking it's time to bring these back?
It does sound (and look) delicious, though rice-based sweet cereals usually don't taste very good.
ReplyDeleteSure. Not sure about ice cream for breakfast but they deserve a chance....
ReplyDeleteCool. Orefon Freeze Dried is still around and in the city I live in no less. In addition to making camping food, they make the dried strawberries in Special K with strawberries.
ReplyDelete