There is nothing more unnerving in an American grocery store than a Grenade Carb Killa® Birthday Cake High Protein Bar. The sight of one, shrieking “GRENADE!” in brutal stencil, is enough to stop a shopper in her tracks. Even the rainbow sprinkles on the package fail to soften the overall look; on the contrary, they make the design more twisted, more grotesquely at war with itself.

What birthed this edible monstrosity? This jarring crash of gym-bro culture with childhood and sweetness and birthday celebrations? The “Carb Killa®” branding, of course, is a Frankenstinian child of the 90’s low-carb, no-carb, Atkins-diet fixation. But the “birthday cake” flavoring? Who (besides some psychotic copywriter at Grenade, that is) decided that “rich white chocolate and an explosion of rainbow sprinkles . . . turn snack time into a real celebration”? Birthday-cake protein bars are only the latest permutation of a larger, rainbow-sprinkled trend painting the American food landscape. Artificial “birthday cake” flavor, only about thirty years old, has been pushing aside the flavors of yore. It’s not just birthday cake, though. Besides the staple flavors (chocolate, vanilla, red velvet, etc.), the food market boasts an increasing number of new(ish) kids on the block: recently developed flavors that have an outsize hold on the restaurant and grocery industries. Think “cookies and cream,” or “blue raspberry” (think about it; it’s weird!) or any other stock-phrase flavor that comes to mind.

There’s something different about these stock-phrase flavors, something that separates them from the old-timey classics. Their distinguishing feature is their lack of standardization. When you order a classic flavor, a raspberry or a vanilla—even a mint chocolate!—there’s a set flavor profile. Raspberry flavor comprises a combination of chemicals, namely raspberry ketone and ethyl formate. Vanilla is made with vanilla extract. Mint flavoring comes from peppermint or spearmint oil. But, heavens, there’s no “extract of cookies and cream!” And pumpkin purée— eaten straight—is bland and sweet-potato-y, nothing like the cozy, autumnal kick of so-called “pumpkin spice”. (Famously, Starbucks’s Pumpkin Spice Latte didn’t contain a hint of actual pumpkin until 2015.2) These newer flavors have fewer direct connections to specific ingredients. They’re less recipe, more idea.

And when it comes to “birthday cake” flavor, there’s another layer—because some time in the 90’s, Americans agreed that birthday cake meant vanilla cake with rainbow sprinkles. Of course, you can have whatever type of cake you want for your birthday, but all agree: if we’re buying birthday-cake M&M’s, they’ll be a rich sort of vanilla with flecks of rainbow. That’s “birthday cake flavor.”
Much has been made of the weirdly lockstep agreement on this decision. Where did that vanilla-with-sprinkles flavor come from? And why have birthday-cake foods multiplied like rabbits in the American grocery aisles? (Annie’s Organic Bunny Graham3 rabbits, for that matter.) Journalists have been pricking their ears up at this flavor trend since the mid-aughts. And recently, there’s been a spate of birthday-cake coverage, mostnotably in the New York Times4, Salon5, and Vox6. These writers generally pin the rise and reign of artificial birthday-cake flavor on millennial Americans’ nostalgia for childhood—but, as yet, no one has definitively settled the questions. I hope to synthesize the existing explanations, and to dig into the factors they fail
to consider.
So here we go! First, we’ll look at the history of birthday cake flavor in America and the major players who brought it to its current level of hypersaturation. Then we’ll see how critics have commented on and diagnosed its popularity. Finally, we’ll examine their explanations. And now: a Definitive History of American Birthday Cake Flavor.

American Funfettification
As the PSL is to pumpkin spice, so is Pillsbury’s Funfetti cake mix to birthday cake. Funfetti is the father, the beau ideal, the bedrock beneath birthday-cake flavor. In 1989, with a commercial showing the Doughboy blowing up a can of Funfetti icing, Pillsbury exploded the box-mix birthday cake world. “Want a bigger bang for your birthday?” a voiceover asks as rainbow sprinkles rain down on the Doughboy. “Nothing says loving like Funfetti.” Funfetti cake mix was the first thing to associate white cake with sprinkles and birthdays. Millennials seem to agree: Funfetti was the totem of 90’s-kid birthday parties. “‘In the 1990s, to have a successful birthday party, you had to beg your mom for Funfetti cake,’ [says] Molly Yeh in the Times. And Ashlie Stevens, in Salon, comments that the original Funfetti flavor “became synonymous with kids’ birthday parties . . . the kind of parties held at dimly lit roller rinks and neighborhood swimming pools.”

Now, thirty years later, Funfetti is simply another way of saying birthday cake (like Kleenex for tissue). Typing “funfetti recipes” into Pinterest yields an array of search-engine-optimized “funfetti birthday cake loaves” and “birthday cake rainbow sprinkled funfetti bars” and “sprinkles funfetti birthday blondies.” Pillsbury seems to have realized they hit the jackpot, as they’ve capitalized as much as possible on their Funfetti line. They’ve riffed on the original mix, having released “Funfetti seasonal mixes: Funfetti with black and orange, or red and green [sprinkles for] Halloween and Christmas . . . Aqua Blue vanilla frosting; Galaxy Space blue frosting; [and] Orange All Star vanilla frosting.”10 Recently, though, Pillsbury’s cut back on the riffing, focusing instead on expanding their classic Funfetti look to new products. You can buy Funfetti-flavored coffee creamer from a Pillsbury/CoffeeMate collaboration, which has “notes of vanilla, cake batter, and a ‘sweet finish reminiscent of frosting.” And in other releases, Pillsbury drops the “Funfetti” facade completely, calling a spade a spade with their Birthday Cake Bars, Birthday Cake Cookie Dough, and Birthday Cake Cookie Dough Poppins.

Suffice it to say: the Funfetti look sells. And other companies, of course, in the intervening years, have been hungry for a slice of the action. For copyright reasons, presumably, they’ve elected to knock off the Funfetti look under the “birthday cake” label, further cementing the rainbow- flecked look as “birthday” one. Yet more conveniently, birthday cake flavor has a built-in gimmick: brands can release a birthday cake version of their product on (get this) anniversaries of their founding. The idea guys don’t have to lift a finger! One of the first brands to release a birthday-cake version was Nabisco, which turned out birthday-cake Oreos on the cookie’s 100th birthday in 2012. That period, from about 2011-2013, seems to have been the second coming of birthday-cake products. If Funfetti took off in the 90’s, the 2010s were the launching pad for Funfetti-by- another-name. In 2013, USA Today reported that at least  birthday-cake flavored products had been released in the year previous, as compared to the mere three products that had come out in the five years before that. We’re talking vodka17 to Party Cake Peeps to toothpaste, as well as protein powder and ice cream. All of these banked on the Funfetti “look” for their design, though we can see further trends in birthday-cake product design emerging from among their ranks (a light blue/turquoise, confetti, general emblems of “fun” and “celebration”).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(early examples (2011-2013) of birthday cake products)

 

A few key influences thrust the birthday-cake trend further into the public eye, namely the following: Instagram and Pinterest, Molly Yeh (food blogger and cookbook author, quoted above), and Milk Bar (a New York bakery founded by millennial Christina Tosi). It goes without saying (though every commenter says so) that birthday cake is inherently Instagrammable—it’s fun and rainbow and eye-catching! Aesthetics researchers investigating so-called “food porn” have found that the popularity of an image on social media “tends to correlate with the extent to which it depicts culinary excesses,” so birthday-cake products, with their kaleidoscopes of color (and the confetti swirls and buoyant exclamations on their packaging), are built to trend. Pinterest, for its part, was founded in 2010—peak birthday-cake years—and continues, to this day, to be a channel crowded with Funfetti recipes. Pinterest’s birthday cake feed features many a post from major Funfetti influence Molly Yeh. Yeh founded a widely popular food blog in 2009, My Name is Yeh, which has grown into multiple cookbooks and a show on the Food Network. She’s known for “lots of rainbow sprinkles”—on everything: macaroons, Battenberg cake, challah, cake pops, you name it. On her blog, Yeh often uses funfetti as a verb—“I funfetti-d it,” she’ll write, or “funfetti-ing everything in sight.” Her devotion to the birthday-cake look in desserts of all kinds has garnered her internet recognition: her cake won Kitchn’s test of the best Funfetti cake recipes, and she’s quoted as an expert in the New York Times’s “Funfetti Explosion.”

Finally, of the Funfetti influencers, there is Christina Tosi, founder of Milk Bar and “the first baker to reinfect rainbow sprinkles into the realm of cool.” Milk Bar, based out of Manhattan, is one of the most influential bakeries—now bakery chains—in America.They ship flash-frozen products all over the States, their branded packaged goods are available in supermarkets nationwide, and the internet is afloat in pictures of their pastries. Milk Bar’s signature creation is their Birthday Cake, a “gourmet take on the supermarket staple Funfetti,” created as far back as 2008. Birthday Cake put Tosi on the map—and she, in turn, widened the Funfetti footprint in the American market. For her part, Tosi chalks her bakery’s popularity up to consumer (and specifically millennial) nostalgia, telling House Beautiful that Milk Bar specializes in “taking apart these colorful, nostalgic things from childhood and putting them back together.” Even the bakery’s branding is meant to have a retro, backwards-looking effect: it’s a combination of 1950’s “ice cream stand (like a retro Dairy Queen) and ’80’s signifiers.”

The third (and final!) stage of Funfettification came in the last few years, peaking during the pandemic. To recap: the 90’s was Pillsbury’s Funfetti mix release and 2011-2013 saw the beginnings of other products, plus the blending of “Funfetti” with “birthday cake.” In the third stage, since 2017, birthday cake flavor has transcended. According to Pinterest, users 25 to 34 saved 260 percent more Funfetti ideas that year than the year before, and Nielsen, a marketing data firm, records a more than 29 percent sales increase market-wide in “the flavor ‘birthday cake’” since 2017. This period has precipitated the deluge of think pieces about birthday-cake flavor, as writers pick up on the trend happening around them.

With all these explanations at our disposal, we’re now in a place to red-string the birthday- cake phenomenon—to craft a sort of police-drama tack board, I mean, with yarn connecting all the notable persons and events. The field at large points to American nostalgia as the chief cause of national Funfettification. This opinion isn’t limited to our three main writers. Au contraire—choose any birthday-cake article at random and the journalist will probably be psychologizing about consumers’ longing for childhood. Usually, the nostalgia is written up as being specifically millennial, but one outlier article quotes an “innovation insights director” who claims the birthday-cake trend is driven “by nostalgic adults who long for memories of times past . . . Boomers, in particular, are enamored with birthday cake mania.” Regardless of whose nostalgia it is, however, millennial or Boomer or generalized, nostalgia is the pick of the journalistic litter—the explanation to which most resort. The second usual diagnosis is birthday cake’s aesthetic clout. Without a doubt, the flavor’s booming popularity (its “kaleidoscopic revolution”) is linked to its particolored look, especially in light of Funfetti’s hyper-circulation on social media channels. And in all honesty, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of color in food appeal. Psychologists have demonstrated that color is “one of the most attractive elements [in food appearance] . . . its impact [can] be so high as to replace sugar in sweetness perception.” And it’s not simply that we buy birthday cake products because we like their rainbow sprinkles. Adjacent findings show that people derive pleasure simply from looking at food pictures. Just browsing the clutter of Funfetti recipes on Pinterest can sate a sort of “visual hunger.” This phenomenon can explain the prevalence of what’s called “food porn”: people are drawn to stylized food photography because, somehow, the brain derives a gustatory pleasure from simply imagining the taste of the depicted food. Birthday cake’s color attracts on both that biological level and on a design level, for the third main cause of its popularity (according to existing explanations) is the fun, celebratory aura surrounding it. As Kristen Miglore, the creative director at Food52, commented: “the colorful sprinkles don’t really do anything in terms of flavor, but they . . . drive home the birthday vibes.” Birthday cake “flavor,” which necessitates the presence of rainbow sprinkles, is a prime example of a designed “thing” in a Judith-Attfield, material-culture-of-the-everyday sense. Attfield differentiates between the designed and the naturally occurring with the phrasal divining rod “with attitude”: is this a thing with attitude or is this just a thing? Birthday cake is essentially just “vanilla with attitude” (added sprinkles)—making it an exemplary designed rather than naturally occurring flavor.

Since only journalists have covered Funfetti and birthday cake flavor, the coverage skews shallowly, towards quotable sources. And while the writers and chefs and marketing executives who produce birthday-cake flavor do provide essential commentary on how and why birthday cake came to be, they don’t have an eagle-eyed perspectives of the flavor’s history. Existing explanations fail to consider the cultural context of birthday cake flavor. And this is a context that’s particularly key in understanding American Funfettification: the era in which Funfetti/birthday cake came about (and the consumers produced by that era—the millennial generation) were peculiarly suited to foster birthday cake’s transcendent popularity. What made the years from (roughly) 1990-2015 the ideal years for birthday cake’s release? Two factors: advertising changes and hipsters.

As America entered the 90’s, marketers were shifting their strategies. Increasingly, advertisements connected the things they sold “with particular lifestyles or identities, . . . not only selling a product, but a lifestyle.” With insights from the field of material culture, of course, we understand that products are never just products; rather, the things we purchase and surround ourselves with act as a sign-language, communicating to others and to ourselves. Jean Baudrillard’s work suggests that, in the consumer society we inhabit, commodities are often consumed more for their sign-value (the meanings they signify) than their use-value (their actual function)—a situation which both results from advertising and feeds future advertising. Consumers buy Quaker Instant Oatmeal, for example, because the sight of it symbolizes nice, nutritious, middle-class breakfasts in their minds, and then Quaker bases its ad campaigns off that imagery. 90’s ads targeting mothers emphasized the idea of “the good mother,” the woman who devotes herself entirely to her children’s health and happiness. The bulk of these good- mother ads, of course, were food-related: whether food for children’s health or food for children’s happiness. If the decade’s food ads were collapsed into one of those word- frequency clouds, the looming phrase would be FOOD IS LOVE. About 80% of food advertisements in the 1990s and 2000s associate food with love—eighty percent! And Pillsbury ads are right on trend: the Funfetti commercial from 1989, the one with the exploding cake, ends with the words, “Nothing says loving like Funfetti.” Another advertisement, in a 1992 Essence magazine (see right), reads:

“With Pillsbury Plus you can make a special cake come true. Because if adding your own special touches is your way of adding a little love, you can do it with Pillsbury Plus cake . . . and frosting your cake with Pillsbury Funfetti frosting makes that love a little sweeter.” The “food is love” idea didn’t just come from 1980’s ad execs—far from it! Rather, this is one of those innate, built-in associations. Daniel Miller devotes an entire section of A Theory of Shopping to establishing that, for a majority of parents (especially mothers), “shopping is primarily an act of love . . . a daily conscientiousness [that] becomes one of the primary [theaters in] which relationships [are acted out]” Shopping for a family prompts a mother to ponder the wants and preferences of her spouse and
children, then to purchase based on those desires and her own desires for her family (healthy food to make them healthier, celebratory cakes to make them feel special, etc.) So these “good mother” advertisements struck right at the core of a woman’s shopping experience. And as more women navigated careers and motherhood in the 80’s and 90s, it was easy for marketers to play on their worries that they weren’t mothering well, that they were somehow neglecting their children. A working mother might not have time to make a cake from scratch for a birthday—but not making a cake would certainly be “bad mother behavior”—so she could pick up a box of Funfetti mix and have it both ways. The combination of “food is love” marketing and the innate, happy-making look of Funfetti mix’s confetti sprinkles boosted the cake’s sales in those first years. And after its bum-rush into grocery stores in the 90’s, birthday cake was carried through the next two decades by hipster culture. The hipster, a little hard to define but immediately recognizable, is an essential character for a variety of reasons— most crucial, perhaps, is that he was the first subcultural figure to define mainstream taste. Hipster values (authenticity, originality, nostalgia, band tees) were disseminated so widely that they came to shape standards for national taste. In the years leading up to birthday cake’s second boom (c. 2011-2013), a wide subsection of hipsters adopted a twee aesthetic. (Twee, from baby talk for sweet, is a nostalgic, whimsical, cute-obsessed style, famously exemplified by Zooey Deschanel.) The Atlantic describes twee’s core values as including “a healthy suspicion of adulthood . . . fetishization of the nerd, the geek, the dork, [and] the virgin.” Twee hipsters loved polka dots, smiley faces, old cameras, cupcakes with a single candle, anything cutesy and childish. The early years of Molly Yeh’s food blog (begun in 2009) are undeniably twee.

Another thing that’s undeniably twee? Rainbow sprinkles. It’s difficult to imagine a twee cupcake (from the earlier list) without picturing sprinkles scattered over the frosting. The cute childishness of rainbow- sprinkled birthday cake lined up exactly with twee hipsters’ aesthetic. And as twee hipster style bled into American style at large, it primed the populace to buy cute, nostalgic birthday-cake products. People who bought chunky wooden glasses and drank out of Mason jars were just the sort to bake rainbow-sprinkled cakes. The 2011-2013 spike in Funfetti products
coincided perfectly with the Twee Revolution (in fact, it’s not unlikely that the Funfetti spike was brought on by a spreading twee aesthetic), and it would be negligent to overlook that cultural aesthetic when charting Funfetti’s history.

The consumer profile of millennials, another factor that’s bolstered the birthday-cake empire, is equally rooted in hipsterism. Millennials (the generation from 1981-1996) came of age in the hipster years and, whether they realized it or not, their taste picked up scraps of hipsterdom as they snowballed into adulthood. Millennials are more inclined to buy for nostalgia, to want to participate in hands-on, “authentic”-seeming activities like baking, and to be drawn to Funfetti for its digital appeal. The bent for nostalgia and authenticity come from hipster values, and the digital appeal bit comes from millennials’ particular connection to social media. Millennials are the first “digital natives”—the first generation to consider “usage of digital devices and social media a natural part of their everyday routine” They were the main group active on social media platforms during birthday cake’s Instagram/Pinterest boom in the mid-2010s, so they would have been both receiving Funfetti marketing and perpetuating it. Even now, Pinterest reports that millennials are the age group saving the most Funfetti recipes. In 2016, it was users 25-34 saving 260 percent more birthday-cake recipes. Those users would have been born 1982-1991—the millennial years.So really, the Funfetti explosion was built off the backs of millennials. But the love story between a generation and a flavor stems from more than generalized nostalgia, as so many journalists glibly diagnose it. To paraphrase Miller, “[generations] don’t spring sui generis out of the ether.” Millennials were particularly nostalgic because of the hipster air they were breathing, and millennials were particularly active on the internet just as it exploded into a kaleidoscope of birthday-cake pictures and recipes. And, of course, they grew up with Funfetti at their nineties’-kid birthdays because “nothing says loving like Funfetti.”

Sign-Value, Use-Value, or . . . Vibe-Value?
The Pillsbury website declares that “For more than 30 years, Funfetti baking products have helped you transform any day into a celebration.” Design historians would agree—or at least agree that that’s the aim of the marketing around birthday-cake flavor. The packaging, the language, the colors—birthday cake is a flavor that has capitalized for thirty years on its associations rather than its taste. After all, it doesn’t taste that different than plain-Jane vanilla; it’s simply “vanilla with attitude,” to call back to Judith Attfield. Most birthday-cake food labels feature spirals of confetti; others, actual birthday cakes with flickering candles. Some have party hats, or celebratory pennants. This, perhaps more than any of the other intriguing bits in the Funfetti history, is most interesting: these new flavors, the birthday cakes and the pumpkin spices, that are consumed more for their (dare I say) vibe than their flavor. We’re seeing a step beyond Baudrillard’s vision of people consuming things for their sign-value rather than their use-value: in some current cases, the vibe-value is the driver of consumption. A man buys pumpkin-spice coffee in October (which is barely dissimilar from his regular coffee—perhaps just a shake more of nutmeg) because he wants to pack every nook of his life with curated autumnal atmosphere. A woman picks up birthday-cake popcorn because
the sight of it gives her a celebratory lift that Orville Redenbacher’s doesn’t.This turn in the flavor world is a microcosm of that larger move towards vibe-curation. In April 2021, the New Yorker released a piece reporting on consumption for vibe-value called “TikTok and the Vibes Revolution.” This discussion around consuming something for its “vibes” is perhaps just the lingo of a society becoming self-aware—in all honesty, the idea of a vibe as I understand it seems just to be a societal shorthand for Baudrillard’s “symbolic value.”

It seems, really, that we’ve been barreling towards vibe-life for a while. That advertising shift towards brands-as-identities in the 20th century has only accelerated with the last decades. And vibe is an established, unexceptional part of the American lexicon: recently, a British friend scoffed at me for saying, “Oh, tell me about your dad! What’s his vibe?” but the other Americans in the room agreed that it was a perfectly normal thing to say. Tectonic cultural shifts like these are always stirring underneath widespread trends like the Funfetti explosion, so much so that, as I said earlier, it’s impossible to chart such a trend in a limited-wordcount think piece. While each of the writers surveyed bring different aspects of the puzzle to the metaphorical table, none explore birthday-cake in enough depth and breadth to get at the whole story.

But, since birthday cake hasn’t been dealt with in academia, the existing narratives are forced to consult other perspectives—and, to be honest, a great cloud of witnesses does emerge to narrate the flavor’s rise. The shared knowledge of journalists and chefs, flavor scientists and food bloggers, candy makers and marketing executives, is nothing to dismiss or depreciate. On the contrary, I think their shared expertise, cobbled together from a variety of places, puts together a compelling narrative, no less valuable than the ivory-tower voices of a Daniel Miller or a Judith Attfield, though I’m eagerly awaiting a birthday-cake treatise from a design historian! But in the end, the birthday-cake phenomenon is nothing if not eclectic—perhaps it’s only right that the voices narrating it are as rainbow-sprinkled as the flavor itself.

 

(written for the Royal College of Art, December 2021)