Seeking the smartness.

When I saw this in the store, I thought, Smartfood has kind of lost the thread here.

What on earth could be smart about Cap'n Crunch's Crunch Berries? 

We'll get back to that shortly. First, a little backgrounder about the history of the Smartfood brand.

Back in 1988, Inc. magazine had a profile on the upstart Smartfood:

It did not come out of the R&D department of Borden or Frito-Lay. Years of expensive consumer testing did not produce this popcorn, which, if truth be known, was originally intended as mere bag filler for a new concept in snack-food packaging. No, this popcorn came from Ann Withey's kitchen stove. Withey, 21, perfected the recipe after fooling around with dozens of different combinations of ingredients. She then fed the results to her 29-year-old husband, Andrew Martin, and their 26-year-old friend and business associate, Ken Meyers. Martin and Meyers thought it tasted swell. They also thought it would make a very smart idea for an all-natural snack food -- so smart they decided to name it Smartfood.

Frito-Lay may not have created Smartfood, but the company bought it in 1989 for $15 million. Anne Withey went on to found Annie's Homegrown, with rabbit Bernie as its mascot, which went public, and was ultimately sold General Mills for $820 million. What an American success story!  

Smartfood was smart for them. But is Smartfood smart for the rest of us? Their pitch was always that it was all-natural, not that it was a diet food, after all, or a panacea in popcorn form. And yet consumers, myself included, have always tended to think of Smartfood products as borderline health food, or at least a healthier alternative to other snacks.  

I looked at some labels. The original white cheddar Smartfood popcorn has 160 calories per 2.5-cup serving and 10 grams of fat (2 of those saturated). A tenth of your sodium intake is also taken care of for the day. That actually is no better than one serving of Lay's potato chips, which has the same amount of calories but less fat and sodium. However, one serving of chips is 15 chips, which will probably be hoovered up a lot faster than 2.5 cups of popcorn. Then look at Orville Redenbacher's fattest popcorn, his Movie Theater Butter variety; a serving of that is 5.5 cups, but if you could stop at 2.5 cups, you'd have fewer calories and less sodium than with Smartfood, but a little more saturated fat. I guess the dairy makes all the difference. 

Really, there's nothing particularly smart about Smartfood, and we'd all be better off eating plain popcorn or no snacks at all. But who wants that? Anyway, we've all gotten fatter since the brand premiered, so our overall fitness smartness has fallen.

Let's cut the chatter and see how bad this Cap'n Crunch version of Smartfood is, shall we? 

It's not exactly loaded with Crunch Berries. Not that sweet, surprisingly. 

Here's the nutritional data:

It's a little deceiving, because the serving size is 3/4 cup less than the regular Smartfood cheese popcorn. Why is that? No one can say. Well, they could -- they make the serving size smaller to make the nutrition data look better. But no one will say that. 

However, I think it does compare well to regular cheesy Smartfood. Moreover, the popcorn itself is not all that sweet. If you want a really sweet popcorn snack, you'd do better with kettle corn. Popcorn Indiana's kettle corn is 130 calories for only 1.5 cups, which means there's barely a dime's worth of difference between that and this Crunch Berry Smartfood. And 1 cup of Cap'n Crunch with Crunch Berries cereal itself is 150 calories, with 32% added sugars (vs. 12% for the Smartfood CB serving). Lesson: If you're craving Crunch Berries, Smartfood is the smarter option. And like all popcorn, it's hard to stop eating once you start. It took just two days for me and my wife to finish this bag. (And she'd scoffed at me for buying it.)

In a way you could call this smart food, then, or at least it compares favorably with other Crunch Berry and sugared popcorn products, and with cheesy popcorn products. But I think the only really smart thing about Smartfood was that the inventors got $15 million out of Pepsi for the brand five years after a disastrous launch, and went on to create an even huger brand with Annie's Homegrown. Someone's smart around here, but it ain't me.