Smurfberry Crunch Cereal
A history of Smurf-themed cereal.
Smurfberry Crunch was a licensed cereal that appeared in the early nineteen eighties during the height of cartoon driven food marketing. Produced by General Foods and tied to The Smurfs television series, it used brightly colored corn pieces and a made up fruit flavor to stand out in an already crowded cereal aisle. Like many cereals of the period, it existed as part of a larger push to turn popular characters into everyday consumer products, especially items aimed at children. By the time the cereal arrived, the Smurfs, created by Belgian artist Peyo, over 20 years earlier, were already familiar through toys and television, and Smurfberry Crunch felt less like an introduction and more like a signal that they had moved to a whole other level.
I might have seen some Smurf toys in this fun novelty/card store we had at the mall before the cartoon began, but like most people in the United States, it was the premiere of the cartoon in 1981 that turned me into a deep blue fan. I loved the Smurfs and the Christmas after they were released was the Smurfiest. It was perfect timing, I was still collecting Star Wars toys, but GI Joe still was on the horizon, so I got a few little blue figures, a Smurf House, and a Smurfs Clay Kit that year. After that, the Smurfs just slowly rolled in, showing up as gifts from my mom or grandmother when they were able to buy something little at the card store. I didn’t play with them much, but I had a shelf I dedicated to them and I liked setting them up and moving them around. Otherwise my fandom was on cruise control until early 1983, when suddenly a that collision of breakfast cereal and Smurfy goodness finally made it into my cereal cabinet.
In February of 1983, in a short article from the New York Times New Service titled, “Troll-like Smurfs are big business,” we see huge optimism for Peyo’s creation. According to the article, in 1982, Smurf related merchandise made more than $700 million. The Wallace & Berrie company, which licensed Smurf products expected “1983 to be a billion-dollar sales year.” With a marketing budget of $40 million they were partnering with over 80 companies to make Smurf toys and other branded products. This included a new cereal.
Partnering with General Foods they promised a cereal that brings the magic and flavor of the Smurfs to your breakfast table. I think they delivered. I can still remember the super sweet berry smell when I first opened the package, and in the bowl, Smurfberry Crunch was impossible to miss. The pieces were bright red and blue, small and crisp, and the milk slowly turned a purplish pink as you ate. The flavor was sweet and loosely fruity, not tied to any real berry so much as a general unreal candy-like taste. I remember it being mild at first bite, then getting much sweeter as it sat in the milk.
While the cereal went wide in March, it started appearing on shelves under the Post brand in late February. The first mention of it for sale I can find is on February 27, 1983 in Trenton, NJ. It was also available in other stores in the South NJ and Philadelphia area at the Shop n Bag supermarket chain. An 11 ounce box there will cost you $1.39. From there the cereal keeps appearing in more markets every week. By April it is pretty much available nationwide in both an 11 ounce and 16 ounce package.
April is when things went into overdrive on the marketing of the cereal. General Foods had budgeted $7.5 million for the rollout and a lot of it went into television advertising. The commercials featured our favorite Smurfs in all of their animated glory.
According to an interview done with Hollywood star Jack Black, the animated commercials weren’t the only ones made. While most might know that Black appeared in an early commercial for the Activision game, Pitfall!, he also made a lesser known appearance in a commercial for Smurfberry Crunch. According to Black in an article from the Associated Press from 2003, when he appeared in the Pitfall! commercial, his friends thought he was the coolest, but not his next commercial. He stated that he quit acting after he appeared in a Smurfberry Crunch commercial, and “became very unpopular in school because of it.” Unfortunately this commercial appears to be lost media, but I keep scouring the web hoping it will pop up someday.
Smurfberry Crunch is often described as a short-lived cereal, but it had a pretty healthy run. As I mentioned it was available in February of 1983 and while it would diminish in its availability, it would remain on the shelves until 1989 with the last recorded mention of it for sale that I could find is in Illinois on June 21, 1989. With that being the final printed promotion, I would guess that by the autumn most of it had disappeared from shelves. Six years on store shelves in pretty impressive, especially since this was made a novelty cereal that was very strongly tied to the cartoon series. A cartoon series that expired uncoincidentally broadcast its last episode in December of 1989.
But if you were to go to the store after that, you didn’t need to return Smurf-less. Because in April of 1988, General Foods launched a brand new Smurf-themed cereal, Smurf Magic Berries. That’s right, for over a year, you could go to a supermarket and pick up not one, but two Smurf Cereals. How to describe them?
Smurf Magic Berries tasted like a broad artificial fruit cereal rather than any specific berry, closer to a generic fruit punch flavor than blueberries or strawberries. The cereal pieces were lightly crisp and fairly mild, with most of the flavor coming from the sugary coating. The marshmallow stars changed the experience quite a bit, adding straight sweetness and a soft, spongy texture once the milk soaked in, so each bowl shifted between crunchy and soft bites. That made it sweeter and less sharp than Smurf Berry Crunch, which stayed firmly in the fruity crunch lane, while Magic Berries edged closer to the Lucky Charms model, fruit cereal with marshmallows and the fruit flavor playing more of a supporting role.
The first mention of Smurf Magic Berries I can find is from April 25, 1988. At that time an 11 ounce box was on sale for $1.99. Not too bad. It’s not clear how long they lasted though. I find references all the way up to 1994, but nothing after that, but I could have sworn that they last longer. I will keep looking and if I can find a definitive answer I will update the post.
This wouldn’t be the last cereal from the Smurfs, as they showed back up in the cereal aisle in 2011 alongside the movie. The cereal itself looked a lot like Fruity Pebbles, made up of tiny crisped rice pieces rather than flakes or shapes, just done in blue and white instead of a full spread of colors. That choice did most of the work, you could tell what it was supposed to be without reading the box. It followed the rules of modern kids cereal at the time, simple, sweet, familiar, and easy to place next to everything else on the shelf, which was really the point. It kept the Smurfs in a space they had already occupied before, and it did it without trying to reinvent anything, which was probably the safest and most boring move.
Smurfberry Crunch ends up being one of those products that makes perfect sense when you look back at it. It sat at the crossroads of cartoons, toys, and breakfast food, and it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It turned a television habit into something you could pour into a bowl. It also lasted longer than most people remember, long enough to feel normal rather than fleeting. By the time it was gone, the Smurfs themselves were fading from daily life, at least in that original form. But for a few years, they were everywhere, even first thing in the morning. And for me, that moment when the milk turned pink was enough to lock it in place. It was not just a cereal tied to a show. It was proof that the Smurfs had fully arrived, right there on the shelf, asking to be eaten while you watched them on TV.
Thanks for this! The flavor, texture, and crunch of this cereal is forever burned into my memory and has never been duplicated.
Long after it had disappeared from shelves in Chicagoland, I once found a few boxes at a tiny grocery store in a small vacation town in Wisconsin. In an uncharacteristic move, my parents bought multiple boxes for me. They must have known how special it was too.
The Smurfs might not have made it so big in America had NBC-TV network boss Fred Silverman not encountered them on vacation in a Colorado toy shop. He was so impressed with the concept that he got on the phone with his old friends at Hanna-Barbera and told them that, if they got the broadcast rights to the Smurfs, they would be guaranteed a timeslot on the NBC Saturday morning schedule- which almost never happens.
But Silverman had burnt a lot of bridges with the executives at NBC with his excessive spending on ambitious but hollow projects, and they fired him just before "The Smurfs" went on the air on the network in the fall of 1981. So it was really the only positive thing NBC got out of hiring Silverman in the first place.