Tomorrow is National Cereal Day.
Today, though, we’re spending some quality time with the boxes that house those breakfast staples, especially the ones decades ago that came with playable records.
If you look at American food history, you know that cereal companies have spent decades trying to entice families to purchase their products by tossing in toys, games, puzzles, action figures, and, in one unusual case, a “deed” to a square inch of land in the Yukon.
Music is part of that promotional tradition as well, though the way that songs found their way onto the breakfast table was really something.
Instead of, say, putting a standard vinyl single into the box, the companies would press the music either onto a thin piece of plastic or onto a perforated bit of the cardboard box itself.
Kids could cut out those cardboard circles and put them on a turntable.
And while the earliest cereal box records featured public domain songs or appearances by cartoon characters, manufacturers eventually started working with some big names in pop music.
The Jackson 5, The Monkees and Bobby Sherman all had their songs printed on cereal boxes.
The promotion definitely worked: the New York Times talked with people in 2025 who remember decades earlier begging their parents to buy the cereal boxes with the records on them, even if they didn’t like actual cereal!
The catch? These records were pretty flimsy, and the sound quality was about what you’d expect from a piece of a cardboard box.
So a lot of people treated them as disposable.
But today there are a few diehard fans who are trying to preserve the remaining cereal records and their unusual niche in food and music history.
And now that vinyl has been making a comeback, maybe it’s time to put songs back on cereal boxes.
Each specially marked box of Alpha Bits comes with a new track by Olivia Rodrigo or Bad Bunny?
Today in 1475, the birthday of Michelangelo.
In 2021, about half a millennium after that birth, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London announced that on a wax sculpture, they had found what appeared to be the artist’s thumbprint.
And, because it’s the 2020s, the thumbprint was found on the figure’s behind.
Cereal Box Records Sound Horrible. They Still Look Incredible. (New York Times)
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