Welcome to “the last bite,” an end-of-week food and ag roundup from the Minnesota Star Tribune. Reach out to business reporter Brooks Johnson at brooks.johnson@startribune.com to share your news and the next big bacon collab.
General Mills and Hormel teamed up to release Cinnamon Toast Crunch-flavored bacon last fall, a sweet-and-savory first for the Minnesota companies.
Now the brand-boosting fun has mutated into another bacon-y creation. The newest mashup between the food giants flips the formula, imbuing smoky bacon flavors into bags of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
“This collaboration is rewriting the rules of breakfast,” Brandon Tyrrell, senior marketing manager at General Mills, said in a rather bold statement.
The limited-time offering — that’s an LTO in industry lingo — is only on Walmart.com for $5.84 while supplies last. (A Target team-up would have made Minnesota explode, probably.)
If anything, this should answer one important question the food industry needs to know: ls this the peak of bacon-on-everything?
Data dish
Following last week’s graphic-heavy story explaining what we grow in Minnesota and why, it’s worth catching up with some crop progress data to see if, indeed, corn was knee-high by the Fourth of July.
It was indeed, and this year’s corn was ahead of last year’s rain-drenched crop thanks to the right mix of moisture and sun early in the season, said University of Minnesota Extension educator Brad Carlson.