⚡ACHTUNG!⚡ General Cooking Thread

Why Doesn’t Smartfood Popcorn Hit Like It Used To?

One woman’s quest to figure out why her beloved white cheddar popcorn started to disappoint.

www.eater.com

Two years ago, a Reddit user posted a bag of Smartfood from 1987 to r/nostalgia. This was from before Ann Withey sold the product to Frito-Lay, when it was still a family business operating out of Marlborough, Massachusetts. Here’s the list of ingredients: “air popped popcorn, natural corn oil, aged cheddar cheese (pasteurized milk, salt, cheese cultures, enzymes), buttermilk, whey, salt, sodium phosphate.”
“Did they change the recipe and sacrifice flavor for cleanliness!?”

“Ingredients labeling was something that the FDA started requiring in the 1970s,” says Xaq Frohlich, associate professor of history at Auburn University and the author of From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age. Before that, the FDA kept its own standards of identity for different food products, and as long as your product followed that standard you didn’t need to disclose the specific ingredients. But consumers wanted to know what was in the increasing number of processed foods on grocery store shelves, and the labels were meant to allow people to make informed choices.

According to the FDA, on any food label, “the ingredients are listed in descending order of predominance by weight, with the ingredients used in the greatest amount first, followed by those in smaller amounts.” So we can glean from this that cheddar cheese is a prominent ingredient in the 1987 version of Smartfood.

Frito-Lay clearly knew it had a hit on its hands, because the company hardly changed the recipe. A package of Smartfood with a copyright of 1995 lists “popcorn, vegetable oil (corn, canola, and/or sunflower oil), cheddar cheese (milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes), whey, buttermilk, natural flavor, and salt.” This list swaps the order of buttermilk and whey and adds a small amount of natural flavor, but otherwise it’s pretty similar to the 1987 version. The ingredients remain the same in a package copyrighted in 2019, after the company updated the logo.

The bag I bought in early March 2025 says the information on the back was copyrighted in 2021, and its ingredient list significantly diverges from the 2019 version. Here’s what it lists: “popcorn, vegetable oil (corn, canola, and/or sunflower oil), natural flavors, whey, maltodextrin (made from corn), buttermilk, cheddar cheese (milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes), salt.” Cheese is now the penultimate ingredient — seventh instead of third, as it had been until now.

“The change in order suggests that they have had a change in the net weight between those different products. So it does suggest a formula change,” says Frohlich. Specifically, it suggests Smartfood began using less cheddar cheese, and more “natural flavors,” which Frolich says is a food term that tends to obscure more than it illuminates. Natural flavors are “very chemical, but they’ve been derived from natural things,” he says; Smartfood itself describes them as “obtained from essences or extracts of sources found in nature such as spice, fruit, vegetable, yeast, herb, plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products.” So, pretty much anything. Companies aren’t required to disclose what specifically they derive their natural flavors from, or what flavors they’re trying to mimic.

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Evil gator said:

I love smart food popcorn

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