Comment by rckoepke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rckoepke | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, great question. Basically wrong flavor and texture. Visually looked quite similar but just had a cardboard consistency. Repeatedly compared vs. grocery store bought over a few months span of alternating purchases to confirm.

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.

You're sure it was not a storage condition or age issue?

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.

Checked expiration dates, they were comparable to store-bought. I store my cereal in pretty abhorrent conditions sometimes (like leaving it in the back of my car during Texas summer for a few days) and never noticed degradation leading to flavor/texure like this, but storage issues are still a possible cause. Maybe I'll do a real experiment sometime involving storing grocery cereal outdoors in the Houston summer and see what happens.

I completely agree with all your sentiments and part of why it took me so long to come to my conclusion.

Yeah, fair, not sure what conditions could cause that kind of degradation if your experiments haven't yielded it. Maybe counterfeiting cereal is just more lucrative than I would've guessed.

> 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.

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.

In what area do they go for $9/box? I've never seen them for more than $5, and you can frequently get them on sale for $2...

I misread a 2-for-1 listing as being the price for a single box. Still, when you look at the cost of cereal and the mark up, there's a significant margin. Grains, sugar, etc are practically free in bulk.

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.

Malt-o-meal makes excellent imitations of name-brand cereals. For example, Golden Puffs = Kellogg's Honey Smacks -- completely indistinguishable, but much cheaper. They make about 30 different kinds of cereal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOM_Brands

I wouldn't say Malt-o-meal is indistinguishable from the name brand because in many cases I like it better. The same? No, but they are for sure worth a try.

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...

I wonder if the cereals customer support would have been interested enough to try to help you confirm it wasn't legitimate

> Or at least diverted from another global region where the recipe/ingredients are somewhat different.

Did you happen to check for differences in the packaging?

I did. They weren't identical but the "counterfeit" wasn't flawed enough to say it was definitely made by a different company as opposed to a different printing facility or box vendor.

I bet those were real cereal that baked in the heat for a few days.

Did you check the expiration dates by any chance?

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.

I got a cannisters of preworkout supplement on Amazon that was a very obvious fraud when put next to the cannister it was replacing. I even mixed up a glass of it and it tasted absolutely putrid and make me feel sick for a day.

It doesn't help that Amazon doesn't give you a clear option to report fraud in your return of a purchase.

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