Cinnamon Toast Crunch Shrimp Fiasco Explained

General Mills CEO applauds claims of caudate crustaceans caught in the packaging process of his popular Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal.

In case you’ve been ignoring all the media for 24 hours and haven’t heard: Jensen Karp, musician-producer-personality and husband of Danielle Fishel, the actress who played Topanga in Boy Meets World, images shared on Twitter Monday of what appears to be shrimp tails and other most unworthy breakfast rubbish swimming around a packet of cereal he bought from a big box store in the Los Angeles area.

“Based on the information currently available to us, it is highly unlikely that this has happened at a General Mills facility,” General Mills CEO Jeff Harmening said Wednesday on CNBC. “So right now, we’re working with this consumer to try to figure out, sort of, what happened between when he left our docks and when he opened it. ”

Harmening’s appearance comes after the incident went viral for the past two days, with Karp documenting the process of negotiating with the company. This has led to a lot of prawn grain jokes, some nervousness about grain safety and some people react to Karp’s plight with skepticism and even share unfavorable personal stories about her. Karp claims that after contacting General Mills, the company said the apparent pieces of seafood were more likely scoops of unmixed ingredients or the result of tampering with the packaging.

Karp this he plans to send samples of the non-grain to the company while sending samples to a third-party lab to confirm that it is indeed shrimp.

There are two main theories as to what is going on here. And, surprisingly, there seems to be some evidence for both. As General Mills says (and certainly hopes), someone (or something) could have tampered with the packaging after it left the company’s production facility.

This is more than wishful thinking on the part of society, because Karp himself tweeted that the other bag in the family pack he bought “looks taped (?)” and an image included in the tweet shows what looks like clear packaging tape.

Another theory, put forward by a number of commenters on Twitter, is that somewhere in the production process rodents have entered certain ingredients for the grain and nestled there. This could explain photos Karp shares of what looks like feces. “I think it’s also important to say that the dark things – are cooked (?) IN the square? ” he says. Shrimp tails and other pieces of trash could be discarded items collected by these rodents for nesting material.

Talk about an unwanted extra crunch.

It is very strange that a single package of the same product, as reported by Karp, shows potential evidence of product tampering and baked-on contamination. I wonder if the visible feces were more compressed in the cereal than cooked. But who knows?

One thing is for sure: a lab confirming that shrimp tails are in fact shrimp tails won’t solve the mystery of their origin – unless the lab confirms that they are not shrimp tails and are truly remarkable. pieces of shrimp tail. sugar.

If so, it would appear that nothing too rude has happened here (provided the other foreign objects are sugar as well). So maybe we’re just a few months away from General Mills to take advantage of the fiasco and release a limited series of Cinnamon Shrimp Crunch.

“To save their business, Cinnamon Toast Crunch needs to make cereal class again,” wrote one Twitter user, “and what’s classier than shrimp?

I know what result I’m looking for.