#Flake cereal serial#

The Case for Sunny Jim: An Advertising Legend Revisited by Eileen Margerum in Sextant, the journal of Salem State College.It was, but is no longer, for sale on the Waitrose website. Since then, the Force wheatflakes brand was revived for UK consumers, and was acquired by Nestlé.

Manufacture of Force cereal ceased in 2013, the reason cited being poor sales, although in the last few years of production the cereal had been difficult to find due to having very few retail outlets, latterly only Sainsbury's, Waitrose and Ocado. A pre decimal coin collection was available with all 10 coins of ER2 including the farthing, circa 1986-88. An unusual marketing campaign in the 1970s was focussed on the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway: perhaps successful, but exposed to a very narrow market. was sold to Rank Hovis McDougall, a subsidiary of the Nestle Company, in 1985. Since 1954 the cereal was manufactured in the UK for domestic sale. In 1940, Force sponsored The Adventures of Superman, a radio show which introduced key concepts to Superman like Kryptonite.

#Flake cereal serial#

He introduced The H-Bar-O Rangers, a popular radio adventure serial for boys involving another permutation of the Sunny Jim character, and linked to an advertising campaign for the cereal. Rice, an Englishman involved in radio production in Buffalo. In 1932 the cereal was reintroduced into the United States by Herbert C.

The cereal, and the Sunny Jim character achieved wide success in Britain, at its peak in 1930 selling 12.5 million packages. Fincken, a former employee of the Force Food Company, set up an agency in 1910 to import American cereals to the UK. A slightly modified version of Sunny Jim and his jingles caught the fancy of British consumers. In 1903 a British subsidiary of the Force Food Company was formed to import the cereal to Europe. Thereafter Force cereal changed ownership frequently. Force was originally produced in a single plant in Buffalo, but by early 1904 the Canadian Grocer reported that there was one more Force food mill in Buffalo, a third mill in Chicago and one in Hamilton, Ontario, producing a total of 360,000 packages per day.Įllsworth overextended and lost control of his companies in 1907. The advertising appeared in magazines, on billboards, and on the sides of urban trolley cars from May 1902 through to the fall. Dorothy Ficken produced line drawings, and Hanff produced lighthearted jingles describing Sunny Jim's transformation. In late 1901 Minnie Maud Hanff, a freelance jingle writer, invented the character Jimmy Dumps, a morose character who on eating the cereal was transformed into Sunny Jim. Perhaps because it was not initially targeted at a well-defined market, it did not sell well. The first advertising copy for the new product described the cereal as 'The Food That is all Food', the advertising images showed rosy-cheeked children, and it was sold in a box decorated with images of muscular men wrestling with chains. First produced in 1901 by the Force Food Company in Buffalo, New York, it was one of three companies owned by Edward Ellsworth and advertised using a popular cartoon figure called Sunny Jim. The product was cheap to produce and kept well on store shelves. Prior to this, the only successful wheat-based cereal products had been Shredded Wheat and the hot semolina cereal, Cream of Wheat. Early Force packaging featuring Sunny Jimįorce was the first commercially successful wheat flake breakfast cereal.