Loading…
23
Can we talk about how boxed cake mix was invented to sell flour and not to make cake?
I fell down a rabbit hole on a food history site during my lunch break and found out that a guy named John D. Duff figured out that if he put powdered molasses and dried eggs in a bag of flour, home bakers would buy way more flour. So the whole thing started as a way to move product, not to make anyone's life easier. I tried telling my sister this while she was frosting a box mix birthday cake at our mom's place in Ohio, and she just stared at me and kept spreading. Did the dried egg version actually taste bad enough that they had to pull it?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
dianal941mo ago
Duff's whole thing was basically "how do we sell more flour" and the cake was just the bait lol. The dried egg version flopped hard because it tasted weird and women in the 1930s were used to baking from scratch anyway. They fixed it later by taking the eggs out so you had to add fresh ones, which made people feel like they were actually baking. Your sister frosting that cake without looking up is honestly the perfect ending to this story.
2