Really interested to hear how you figured out the breakfast was fake
It was somehow both immediately obvious and also subtle. My girlfriend eventually confirmed that something didn't seem right with it, so we started buying back-to-back orders alternating from grocery stores vs. amazon. Every once in awhile we'd get non-counterfeit cereal from Amazon but mostly it was "fake". Or at least diverted from another global region where the recipe/ingredients are somewhat different.
I always wanted to do some quantitative analysis like density or fill size or precise box dimensions or spectrometry of the ink on the boxes. But at the time I was just trying to convince myself that I wasn't crazy, and eventually I was 100% sure so I stopped experimenting before bothering to collect quantitative data.
I think you might be right in your theory that it was made by the correct company but intended for a different market and was made with a different formulation. Perhaps there's some arbitrage opportunity there.
I guess I don't understand why someone would try to counterfeit something like cereal. Seems like it would be hard to get enough scale to make it worth the effort, given the low per-unit profit.
I completely agree with all your sentiments and part of why it took me so long to come to my conclusion.
Cereal is cheap, like really cheap, and name brand cereals like Raisin Bran go for nearly $9 a box.
If you've ever been in a discount store, or a liquidator with a consumer facing outlet, tons of counterfeit food, toiletries, etc flood their shelves.
Both the counterfeiter and the retailer benefit from selling counterfeit goods, and sometimes consumers either don't care or don't have enough information to tell the difference.
When I was living in Manhattan boxes of cereal were regularly north of $7, but I know that doesn't reflect most of the market.
Anyone in my family can tell the difference between Kellogg's raisin bran and M-o-m, so I think it is safe say some people would notice a counterfeit cereal.
Now I'm hungry...
Did you happen to check for differences in the packaging?
I'd be highly suspicious that this was, in fact, food counterfeiting in any way. I've never heard of a food brand being counterfeited on Amazon (with actual evidence). Food "counterfeiting" is generally a "legitimate" manufacturer themselves falsely representing their ingredients (e.g. diluting their olive oil with canola oil).
Amazon used to be known for keeping boxed foods for much longer than a grocery store -- so if cereal takes 2 years to expire, at the grocery store you're always buying cereal that was made last month, while from Amazon it might have been made a year and a half ago.
If it wasn't the expiration date, then it was probably kept in a very hot environment for an extended time, which also breaks down flavor and texture. If kept on pallets under plastic in the blazing sun for days, it could cook them like an oven, flavor goodbye. (Might not have even been Amazon, but a wholesaler or similar.)
Everything you've said is far more consistent with time/heat than the notion that you were getting "counterfeit" cereal.
It doesn't help that Amazon doesn't give you a clear option to report fraud in your return of a purchase.