8 Blue M&M’s: Back in January the corporate candy kingpins at Mars announced a consumer poll to choose a new M&M’s color. The ballot listed blue, purple, pink, and an option to leave the colors as they were. But the firm neglected to mention that if a new color was selected, it wouldn’t simply be added to the mix–it would replace tan, which would be exiled from the M&M’s family of colors. As a result, voters didn’t realize they were sending tan off to the glue factory. Ten weeks and over ten million votes later, blue was the landslide winner, with 54 percent of the vote. Only then did Mars acknowledge its plans for tan genocide, which struck some consumers as the sort of election fraud usually reserved for third-world dictatorships. This led to a small “save tan” protest that failed to sway the powers that be. Blue had its debut and tan its demise in late summer.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
8 Frosted Cheerios: General Mills’ Cheerios cereal line, which already features honey-nut and apple-cinnamon varieties, took another step away from oat-bran purity with the autumn launch of Frosted Cheerios. Early consumer reviews were mixed. Several unimpressed cereal mavens on the alt.cereal newsgroup pointed out that Frosted Cheerios taste exactly like Alpha-Bits. “Yeah,” sniffed one observer, “only every letter’s an ‘O.’”
