Wheaties Box Cover a Tie to Past

This week Wheaties unveiled its newest box cover athletes, winter sports stars Shaun White, Lindsey Vonn, and Seth Wescott.  For me, the Wheaties box and the Sports Illustrated cover hold the same cache — at any given time, it represents where our sports stars fit into the bigger picture of American life.

The Wheaties box goes back even further than SI, though it started as a back cover rather than the front, when Lou Gehrig was the first athlete to appear in 1934.  The list of athletes is a who’s who of sports through the decades, with the obvious names that have become legendary like Yogi Berra, Ben Hogan, and Magic Johnson, to forgotten ones like Olympic diver Jane Fauntz, Michigan football player Benny Friedman and 1930s and 40s baseball player Cecil Travis.

But even the ones we don’t remember today have a place in the pantheon of boxes — for that moment they were relevant enough that a cereal company thought that their presence on the box would sell cereal, and would represent the wholesome image that the Wheaties brand tries to reflect.

I was shocked in 1997 to find that Jackie Robinson had never been on the cover.  I had been doing some work with General Mills, through the PR agency at which I worked, and was pleased to meet Jackie’s daughter and grandson at a press tour and press conference, which tied in nicely to the 50th anniversary of Robinson’s first game with the Dodgers.

It’s this tie to the past that interests me the most about the new cover athletes.  Though General Mills has been tinkering with the brand, trying to appeal to a younger audience with something called Wheaties Fuel, after having tried to capture the same cover-athlete phenomenon with the short-lived Team Cheerios brand (for which I was a member of the initial PR team back in 1997), the use of White, Vonn and Wescott reflects not only three current Olympic heroes, capitalizing on their popularity, but an attempt to make the Wheaties brand more attractive to a younger audience.