Why are lunchables so expensive

The make-it-yourself pizzas and cracker stacks retain their status in the lunch table Pantheon to this very day. However, since one successful product requires three more to be born in its wake like a sort of children's branding hydra, the Lunchables line has ballooned to a pretty wide collection, each with a few different subsets of its own. Yay capitalism.

The mix-and-match nature of Lunchables makes it easy to cater to even more specific tastes in the lunch market, an important factor when trying to get into the lunch bags of the most picky eaters imaginable. As a result, the "best" kind of Lunchable, so to speak, depends heavily on the individual consumer's tastes -- in theory. In reality, Lunchables are more than lunch. They're cafeteria ammunition in the battle of "Who has the coolest lunch?

So what do they taste like? We're sticking with the classics here. I'm also not going to be reviewing the non-Lunchables items, such as the candy or Capri Sun.

Who thought it was a good idea to give a child a pile of chips, a vat of liquid cheese, a Kit-Kat and a Capri Sun? Because the kids aren't going to touch the salsa since they've got the cheese and because the salsa isn't very good. There's a strange amount of spicy kick for a vat of cheese that's geared toward 8-year-olds. There's a bit too much "nacho" and definitely not enough "cheese.

The chips are vaguely tortilla flavored and have a weird bit of pale corn aftertaste. Lunchables Chicken Dunks. Contains: Chicken nuggets, ketchups, Nerds, Capri Sun. Years ago, at Clara Macy Elementary School, we had a few different options for lunch, none of which were very good.

Most usually settled on pizza. But every now and then, us kids would go for the chicken nuggets, which we joked were made out of gym mats. The nuggets were spongey and had little chicken-y flavor to speak of McDonald's nuggets were gold compared to these. But they did have one redeeming feature. They bounced -- high.

The Lunchables Chicken Dunks are probably worse than those. They either taste like nothing or ketchup. Fortunately, they come with ketchup.

On the downside, they do not bounce. Warning: Do not attempt to bounce chicken nuggets in your office. Someone will notice. Contains: Waffle sticks, syrup, bacon bits. There's a belief out there that the Taco Bell Waffle Taco is the bottom of the fast-food barrel.

The syrup is fine, as are the bacon bits. The problem lies in the waffle sticks, which taste old -- and not a stale old either. They taste old like they've been stored in a warehouse since World War I. The texture is somewhere between spongy and ratty drapes. Lunchables Pizza Kabbobbles. According to the USDA via Fox News , "Mechanically separated poultry MSP is a paste-like and batter-like poultry product produced by forcing bones, with attached edible tissue, through a sieve or similar device under high pressure to separate bone from the edible tissue.

The basic turkey in a Lunchables meal contains modified cornstarch, dextrose, carrageenan, and a whole mess of other ingredients that provide cheap fillers and prolong the shelf-stability of the product. Even the cheddar cheese make that "Pasteurized Prepared Cheddar Cheese Product" contains 15 ingredients.

Coupled with artificial flavors, colors, saturated fats, and high fructose corn syrup, it's easy to see why Lunchables doesn't have the best rep in the cafeteria. But hey, even Oscar Mayer admits that Lunchables' purpose is to "provide a convenient way for busy moms to occasionally treat their kids to their favorite foods," adding that they aren't meant to be a daily habit.

That's probably for the best. Advertising slogans can truly make or break a product, and Lunchables have gone through quite a few different slogans that definitely appeal to kids: "Lunch will never be the same. And while kids growing up in the United States see anywhere from 13, to 30, TV commercials each year, Lunchables commercials seem to be a bit sparse during cartoon hour.

That's due to the Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative , a self-regulating group for companies to set up their own rules about how they market to kids. Kraft agreed they would only advertise their Lunchables that met a certain set of nutritional guidelines. This means that in April , Kraft had 42 Lunchables, but only five of them met the minimal nutritional standards for fat, calories, and sodium to be able to be advertised.

Basically, if you see a spot for Lunchables, you can assume that it must be nutritionally "okay. It turns out that this quick and easy school lunch for the kids might be causing their teachers a bit of angst According to Nourishing Plot 's Becky Plotner, ND, a teacher claimed that " Lunchable Kids " experience a lot of negative effects after consuming them, saying, "Their behavior is problematic in the classroom, disruptive, and exhausting.

They take shortcuts, have poor attitudes and seem to struggle socially. I also believe that the lack of nutrition makes it difficult for the kids to function. Some teachers have even banned Lunchables from their classrooms, going so far as to sending notes home with kids explaining to parents why the lunch choice isn't allowed. One teacher commented on a message board , saying, "Every day I see Lunchables at lunch and now snack time in my kindergarten class. It's peer pressure, even at that early age.

Once in a while, a kid who usually eats healthy will have one, take a bite and refuse to eat the rest, but that's rare. I am sure that these things are maybe 50 cents to make and are terrible for the environment and child! We know it's the goal of all celebs to break the Internet , but Kylie Jenner probably didn't think Lunchables would be the thing to do it.

But the Keeping Up With The Kardashians star did just that when she shared an Instagram story of how she had microwaved a pizza Lunchables , asking her followers if they liked them hot or cold. There's no reason why she chose to microwave a Lunchables considering most kids who eat them at school don't even have access to a microwave, and if kids or adults were eating them at home aren't their roughly gazillion bazillion other delicious microwavable food choices, like pizza rolls or microwavable frozen pizzas or pizza bagels or pizza sticks or even leftover pizza?

The people of Reddit were curious as to how others enjoyed the little cracker-like disks of pizza product, and considering the replies consisted of sentiments like, "What kind of psycho heats up the pizza? Jenner's followers, however, backed her up, with 71 percent saying they preferred the Lunchables pizzas hot.

A lot of grownups happily remember chowing down on Lunchables as kids, and a lot of adults still eat them to this day. One Redditor proudly proclaimed, "I would sell my soul to the devil for a Lunchable. I still get the pepperoni pizza ones when I'm drunk at Wawa at 2am. Another Redditor shared a very touching Lunchables-centric story about his father's visits after his parents divorced, saying, "One major thing that will always stick with me is that he always used to buy us a lunchable of our choice right when we saw him.

I eventually tried them all, but my favorite were the cracker stackers. This memory of love and enjoyment of seeing my dad, has now transcended into lunchables. Whenever I see lunchables now, no matter what mood I am in or how that day has gone, my mind goes to that happy place when life was simple and filled with love. Maxwell's impression of the product was, essentially, that this was all good news. Instead of discontinuing the money-hemorrhaging product, Philip Morris injected more money into developing Lunchables' trays, and by , production costs broke even.

If your impression is that the lack of nutrition is a byproduct of cost-saving measures, Lunchables' history belies that. Perhaps the strangest thing about Lunchables' legacy is that its manufacturer has repeatedly tried to pivot toward healthier ingredients— only to fail every time. In a move that's almost unthinkable today, Oscar Mayer publicly mocked that physician's concern.

The continued success of Lunchables hasn't hinged on kids alone, either; though marketed to children, Lunchables sales data show that anywhere from a quarter to a third of Lunchables are bought and consumed by adults. People know they're terrible for them. They keep eating them anyway.

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