In 2023, Pop-Tarts changed the world of brand mascots forever when it sacrificed the life of a Strawberry Pop-Tart and fed its remains to the Kansas State football team as a reward for winning the Pop-Tarts Bowl game. The weirdly macabre stunt got 4 billion media impressions, and in the eight weeks following the game, parent company Kellanova sold 21 million more Pop-Tarts than in the eight weeks before the game.
Riding on that success, the brand upped its ambitions and brought three flavors to the Pop-Tarts Bowl last year, letting the winning team’s MVP choose which one was toasted and eaten (Iowa State’s quarterback, Rocco Becht, picked Frosted Cinnamon Roll). Now Pop-Tarts has announced that it’s dramatically expanding its “edible mascot” lineup for the next big game, scheduled to be played in Orlando’s Camping World Stadium on December 27th.
Six edible Pop-Tarts mascots—three on Team Sprinkles and three on Team Swirls—will be up for mass consumption, with fans voting ahead of time on which team should be sacrificed.
For Pop-Tarts, it’s a significant jump in both sacrificial anthropomorphic breakfast pastry and the stakes for its brand stunt strategy. Many viewers will undoubtedly be giddy at the prospect of doubling the number of mascots involved, but there’s a cost to escalating the premise so much in such a short period of time: Pop-Tarts is now entering into an unnecessary arms race with itself.
When I posed this theory to the brand’s VP of marketing, Leslie Serro, she didn’t agree. “Expanding from three to six edible mascots this year isn’t about an arms race; it’s about evolution,” she says. Serro tells me that they concluded after last year’s success that fans have an “insatiable appetite for the playful and unexpected nature of the Pop-Tarts Bowl.” Thus, the doubling down from three to six mascots and “raising the stakes.”
To be fair, will I be looking for social clips from the game on the 27th, in that dead zone between Christmas and New Year’s? Sure. Serro’s got me there. But will I feel as sick as if I ate six Pop-Tarts rather than just one (or even three)? Yes.
Let me explain why Pop-Tarts, which so brilliantly spoke to the culture two years ago, risks toasting all that goodwill.
Mascot Power
It’s easy to see why Pop-Tarts would want to crank up the mascot machine and get even more brand characters into the game (albeit to kill and eat them). A 2021 whitepaper by the Moving Picture Council found that long-term campaigns featuring a character increased market share 39.2%, compared with 29.7% for campaigns without a character; it also boosted profit gain 34.2% (versus 29.7%).
A report by System1 found that 2025 Super Bowl ads with brand characters performed better than those featuring celebrities. For example, an M&M’s 2023 Super Bowl spot starring Maya Rudolph underperformed because people didn’t make the connection between Rudolph and the brand. As a celebrity, she could’ve been selling anything. Scores then soared once the M&M’s characters returned in a second spot. Mascots aren’t just cute and fun. They create a faster route to being memorable, and being memorable tends to directly influence what we buy.
Two key factors in any successful mascot are longevity and consistency. Just think about the lifespan of some of the most iconic mascots: The Michelin Man was created in 1898! Tony the Tiger was born in 1952. Mr. Clean’s mascot came around in 1957. Chester Cheetah of Cheetos fame first dropped in 1986. And the Energizer Bunny started banging that drum in 1989. Both the Aflac Duck and Geico’s Gecko have been flogging insurance since 1999. Even Duolingo’s Duo, often considered a new-wave TikTok darling brand mascot, has been around since 2011. These are brand assets built for the long game.
Pop-Tarts is attempting to do something similar. Six months before the 2023 Pop-Tarts Bowl, the brand unveiled its new cast of characters, the “Agents of Crazy Good,” as an update to characters from its “Crazy Good” ads of the early ’00s. The Agents were described as “representations of the beloved toaster pastries brought to life, including Frosted Strawberry, Brown Sugar Cinnamon, Hot Fudge Sundae, and a squad of Bites. The ingenious crew come fully frosted and ready to challenge expectations for where the brand can show up next.”
Funnily enough, in tying the Agents back to the “Crazy Good” doodle characters from 20 years ago, Pop-Tarts is at least trying to conjure a new history of consistency. (Side note: Bring these ads back!)
Beyond Breakfast
The original goal of introducing Pop-Tarts as edible mascots, and even sponsoring the college bowl game in the first place, was to expand our purchase intention beyond breakfast and into the rest of the day. To go from breakfast to snack. The brand saw college football as the perfect vehicle to take that message.
The edible mascot came about as the brand knew it had to contend with a laundry list of branded College Bowl games, each with their own brand mascot gimmick (Duke’s Mayo dumping mayonnaise on the winning coach, or Kellanova sibling Cheez-It’s mascot Ched-Z officiating a wedding during a game time-out).
According to Serro, last year’s Pop-Tarts Bowl drove nine times more share of voice than 20 other non-Kellanova Bowl games combined, a 275% increase in social engagements versus 2023, and the highest brand search in more than 15 years on game day. The brand also sold millions more Pop-Tarts in the month following the game than the month before it.
The brand could have stuck with the single edible mascot for a few years, then slowly, methodically, year after year, started adding more characters and concepts. In my opinion, this would build more familiarity, anticipation, and, by extension, enthusiasm.
But where do we go from here? If it’s 6 edible mascots this year, do we jump to 10 or 12 in 2026? When will the numbers game cease? Maybe it goes full Bud Bowl, and we have two full football squads of Pop-Tarts on the field playing for the right to be enthusiastically toasted and devoured. Glorious.
To be clear, I love this idea, and it’s a prime example of a marketer cleverly finding “white space” in a saturated marketing landscape and eventizing something, seemingly out of nothing. In that way, it’s kindred to FanDuel’s “Kick of Destiny” work in the last three Super Bowls. It also turned things up a notch, going from Rob Gronkowski as a single kicker during a live commercial break to Peyton and Eli Manning facing off in a special pregame show. Both 2024 and 2025 attracted about 2 million participants on FanDuel, so the evolution appears to have worked.
With Pop-Tarts, the edible mascot barely became a tradition before it was hurriedly super-sized and multiplied. As a result, Pop-Tarts may have just bitten years off the gimmick’s lifespan by so quickly feeding into our culture’s insatiable appetite for newer, bigger, now now now. It’s a reflection of a broader issue in brand culture, where marketers are churning through ideas so quickly that nothing is given the time to become truly iconic.
It’s also possible the brand needs to cash in its Bowl hype on a short timeline, given it signed a one-year title sponsorship deal for 2023, then exercised its two-year extension option last year. Serro wouldn’t provide details on whether the brand will extend its Bowl investment beyond this year. “While we can’t share much just yet, let’s just say we love football and the way it brings fans together,” she says.
But based on its popularity so far, and if they play their breakfast pastry cards right, the horizon for edible mascots could be incredibly long. They could star in ads, and then dip into real life as pop-culture nomads, showing up at any given extravaganza—state fairs, movie premieres, music festivals, the Super Bowl—until the end of time. Let’s face it, with a yearslong legacy like that, the people would . . . ahem . . . eat it up, and we’d have the Energizer Bunny of deliciously suicidal brand mascots.
