In this commercial for Fruity Pebbles, Fred and Barney share a house with two real children

Originally published at: In this commercial for Fruity Pebbles, Fred and Barney share a house with two real children | Boing Boing

Let’s not pretend this is Fred and Barney’s most questionable marketing decision.

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Ahhh, the eighties…

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I had all the questions when I was a kid on this one.

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Here’s my Fruity Pebbles story. So I own a company that recreates cannabis flavors. We do a slate of standard flavor profiles, and we also do custom work for customers who want specific strain profiles or other flavor formulas. A couple of years ago a client requested a reproduction of “Fruity Pebbles”, which is a cannabis strain. This customer usually wanted us to spike these profiles with artificial flavorings, so in addition to the gas chromatography terpene data for the original strain, he wanted it to “taste like Fruity Pebbles cereal”. This usually means adding limonene and citral plus strawberry and banana flavors, but we had no idea what the cereal tastes like, so we bought a box and tried it.
It tasted like nothing. Like sweetened cardboard. Turns out a few years ago when all the cereal manufacturers removed artificial flavors, they didn’t replace them with anything at all. They kept the sugar, so kids wouldn’t complain, but they absolutely removed all the fruit flavor. Even isolated natural flavorings went out the door. I realize that people are iffy about artificial flavors, but I’m not sure raising generations of kids on sugar-saturated completely flavorless cereal is any better.

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My first thought was, “for breakfast cereals?”
And I can’t really come up with a better use case, so I will be on the lookout for the limited edition box of “Fruity Pebbles” flavored Fruity Pebbles™

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I haven’t noticed this to be the case when I last got that cereal, but you might try the malt-o-meal dyno-bites. I don’t think they removed the flavors, and I buy it because it’s cheaper.

In a nutshell, the process of distilling THC pure enough to put in a vape pen strips it of all the important chemicals called terpenes. Cannabis can contain dozens of different terpenes which both provide flavor and in some cases physiological effects - they are part of what’s called the “entourage effect”. Almost none of them are unique to cannabis, too, so they can be (and are) sourced from all kinds of other plants. Each strain has its own unique ratio of terpenes. So what we do, is recreate these terpene ratios with terpenes sourced from non-cannabis plants. Cart manufacturers use them to restore lost terpenes, but also cbd product manufacturers, topical product makers and food manufacturers all use them too. We’ve been doing this for over five years and we’ve sold over a million dollars worth of them.

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Very cool! Thanks for the explanation!

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