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Each toy had to be above a certain weight so it would drop properly into the packet on the production line but, obviously, it couldn’t be too heavy. “You couldn’t stray even a few millimetres,” Allerton says. Kellogg’s toys could be a maximum of 50 x 70 x 20mm. Before pitching, Logistix would run focus groups with families, checking that designs were mum and child-approved. “We were never guaranteed business,” Rodrigues says. Logistix was just one of three agencies that worked on promotions for Kellogg’s – each had to pitch their ideas. By the time Logistix entered the arena in the 1990s, the cereal-toy industry was, Allerton says, “fiercely competitive”, thriving amid a licensing boom. In 1966, you could get farm animals in your Sugar Puffs in 1967 there were Noddy figurines among your Ricicles in 1976 Mr Men stickers fell out of your Coco Pops box.

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While the first ever free cereal promotion can be traced back to 1905 – when Quaker Oats offered real china bowls to customers who collected enough tokens – the 1950s were the first time that freebies were placed inside the box. That same year, “the amazing underwater frogman” was available in packs of Nabisco Shreddies. In 1957, Kellogg’s created miniature plastic submarines that could be filled with baking soda so they would sink and surface in the bathtub. Yet Logistix did not invent the concept of in-the-packet cereal toys. To produce something to capture kids’ attention was so challenging’ In 2005, the team came up with Star Wars lightsabers that had “extended play value” thanks to a ball maze inside the toy. “We created various kid-tracking studies… We were collecting data on how much pocket money they got, how many kids had tellies in their rooms.”īy 1997, Simpsons-shaped rings that squirted water at unsuspecting victims were all the rage. Madeley elaborates on the depth of their research. “We had a qualitative and quantitative research team, a dedicated quality-control team,” says Rodrigues. Logistix was founded in Marlow in 1989 and first began designing toys for Kellogg’s in the early 90s. “They’re very strict and precious over how their characters appear,” she says, “My record, I think, was 16 rounds of amends on Spider-Man’s bottom.”Īllerton and Rodrigues say they can’t overstate the sheer number of experts involved in the process of making a cereal toy.

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Marketer Nicola Rodrigues, 42, did the tougher work of liaising with licensors and ensuring that movie studios were happy with what ended up in the box. Meanwhile, Madeley got to walk the red carpet London film premieres and stay at Lucasfilm’s Skywalker Ranch in San Francisco.įigures of fun: Ian Madeley, now 67 and the founder of Logistix, estimates that over the years his company has produced well over 1bn colourful cereal toys. Once, when designing Spider-Man water squirters, he was taken on a top-secret trip to Hollywood for a sneak peek at the upcoming film. In real life, however, cereal-toy designing was often great fun. “It’s a mould for a plastic hippopotamus that’s going to end up in a packet of breakfast cereal,” he laments of his life’s work, while sitting in a drab office with dull colleagues, before quitting for good.

In the 1975 sitcom The Good Life, protagonist Tom Good (Richard Briers) is a cereal-toy designer who packs it all in to become a self-sufficient suburban farmer. As a hopeless nostalgic, I have long wondered: where did these toys come from and where did they snap, crackle and pop off to? “These days, the breakfast cereal aisle is bloody boring,” says Madeley. Yet, technically, when you buy a box of cereal today, you get less for your money than at any point in the past 60-odd years. In mid-February, Shreddies and Cheerios manufacturer Nestlé warned of impending price hikes – last year, wheat shortages, shrinkflation and inflation had already increased the cost of breakfast.