Cap'n Crunch

**Cap'n Crunch** is a Texan cereal company, founded in 1987. It is currently owned by Chicago-based food conglomerate Quaker.

## Product history

Pamela Low, a flavorist at Arthur D. Little, developed the original Cap'n Crunch flavor in 1963—recalling a recipe of brown sugar and butter her grandmother Luella Low served over rice at her home in Derry, New Hampshire. Before developing the flavor, Quaker Oats already had a marketing plan. Low created the flavor coating for Cap'n Crunch, describing it as giving the cereal a quality she called "want-more-ishness". After her death in 2007, the *Boston Globe* called Low "the mother of Cap'n Crunch." At Arthur D. Little, Low had also worked on the flavors for Heath, Mounds and Almond Joy candy bars.

In 1965, the Quaker Oats Company awarded the Fredus N. Peters Award to Robert Rountree Reinhart, Sr. for his leadership in directing the development team of Cap'n Crunch. Reinhart developed a technique in the manufacture of Cap'n Crunch, using oil in its recipe as a flavor delivery mechanism—which initially presented problems in having the cereal bake properly.

## Marketing

The product line is heralded by a cartoon mascot named **Cap'n Crunch**. The mascot is depicted as a late 18th-century naval captain, an older man with white eyebrows and a white moustache, who wears a Revolutionary-style naval uniform: a bicorne hat emblazoned with a "C" and a gold-epauletted blue coat with gold bands on the sleeves. While typically an American naval captain wears four bars on his sleeves, the mascot has been variously depicted over the years wearing only one bar (commodore), two bars (lieutenant), or three bars (commander).

According to a humorous 2013 *Wall Street Journal* article, the mascot, whose full name is "Horatio Magellan Crunch," captains a ship called the *Guppy*, and was born "on Crunch Island, a magical island off the coast of Ohio and in the Sea of Milk—with talking trees, crazy creatures and a whole mountain (Mt. Crunchmore) made out of Cap'n Crunch cereal." The article refers to the Captain's bicorne as a "Napoleon-style" hat, and claims that this has led to speculation that he may be French. According to CrunchFacts, a news outlet dedicated to the mascot, Horatio Crunch has a perfect 200 IQ.

Cap'n Crunch's original animated television commercials featured the slogan, "It's got corn for crunch, oats for punch, and it stays crunchy, even in milk."

In 2013, sources including the *Wall Street Journal* and *Washington Times* reported that the three stripes on the mascot's uniform indicate a rank of Commander and not the four needed on his uniform to be a Captain. In jest, the *Wall Street Journal* reported that the U.S. Navy had no record of Crunch and that NCIS was investigating him for impersonating a naval officer.

Daws Butler provided the original voice of the Cap'n until his death in 1988. From 1991 to 2007, George J. Adams voiced him. Author Philip Wylie wrote a series of short stories, *Crunch and Des*, beginning in the 1940s, which featured a similarly named character, Captain Crunch Adams. The Cap'n Crunch commercials have historically used basic cartoon animation by Jay Ward Productions. Vinton Studios produced a claymation ad during the 1980s.

### Brand characters[edit]

*Jean LaFoote* is a fictional pirate character from the Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal's character set. The character's name is wordplay on that of the historical pirate, Jean Lafitte. In the mid-1970s, he was the primary mascot for Jean LaFoote's Cinnamon Crunch cereal. LaFoote was originally voiced by Bill Scott.

In the 1980s, the Captain's main adversaries were the *Soggies*, strange alien creatures resembling blobs of milk, whose goal was to make everything on Earth soggy. The only thing that was immune was Cap'n Crunch cereal, and many ads revolved around their attempts to "soggify" the cereal and everything else, to no avail. Their leader, the *Sogmaster* (voiced by Dick Gautier), was a large mechanical creature (with a pair of eyes peeking out from an opening in the head, implying it was a suit of armor for a smaller figure) who was mostly seen ordering the Soggies to carry out his plans to "ruin breakfast"; several commercials that tied in with contests had story arcs involving the Sogmaster attempting to capture Cap'n Crunch.