Coco Pops: How did the cereal come to have such a hold on children?

“Children are particularly vulnerable to quirky, brightly coloured animals which spew out very simple messages that may not be healthy for them”

Coco the Monkey is among the characters blamed for influencing food choices

It’s not easy being a cartoon monkey. One minute you’re the king of the swingers, the jungle VIP, you’ve reached the top after evolving from ad agency Leo Burnett into the hearts of a nation.

As Coco the Monkey, you’ve been persuading us to eat Coco Pops cereal in TV ads since 1986. Kids love you for your cheeky cartoon capers promising “chocolatey fun”. Grown-ups love you because they too once sang along to your jingle: “I’d rather have a bowl of Coco Pops.”

And cereal maker Kellogg’s loves you, because you helped Coco Pops sales increase by 90 per cent and brand profitability to grow fivefold between 1986 and 1992.

And then, as you approach 30, it all goes wrong. You go from cartoon monkey to bête noire, the alleged face of the childhood obesity “epidemic”. Demands are made for a sugar tax on products like Coco Pops, which contains 35g of sugars in every 100g.

In the absence of William Gladstone, the stern-faced Victorian Prime Minister who started it by abolishing the sugar tax in 1874, you find yourself in the firing line, alongside Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

You wonder whether Dr Alison Tedstone, Public Health England’s director of diet and obesity, wants to throw you to your arch enemy Croc and his gang of hyenas. She it was who told the House of Commons health select committee this week: “The evidence is that things like those Coco Pop monkeys do engage children and affect food choice.”

Others were even more forthright. “Yes, absolutely we would like to see a ban [on the Coco Pops monkey],” said Tam Fry, spokesman for both the National Obesity Forum and the Child Growth Foundation. “Children are particularly vulnerable to quirky, brightly coloured animals which spew out very simple messages that may not be healthy for them.”

And where now were Coco’s friends? Leo Burnett referred The Independent to Kellogg’s. Gavin Inskip, voiceover artist, stand-up comedian, and voice of Coco, would normally love to talk, but not now: “I don’t want to get in trouble for doing anything I shouldn’t.”

At least Kellogg’s provided a spirited defence of their “spokes-simian”. “He’s the monkey next door and a friend to everyone,” insisted a (human) spokesman. “We see cereals as part of the solution. They are typically low calorie, low-fat choices that are fortified with vitamins and minerals. They only contribute around six per cent of the sugar in the nation’s diet.”

But then The Independent read the Eyes in the Aisles report by the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, New York. Children’s cereals weren’t just allegedly placed half as high up the supermarket shelves as adult breakfast food, in the ideal spot for attracting youthful attention. In 51 out of the 59 US cereal varieties surveyed by the researchers, the eyes of the cartoon characters on the box were pointing downward at the perfect angle for staring into the eyes of an innocent child.

The research was challenged by the Trix Rabbit. (Well, Tom Forsythe, the vice president of global communications for General Mills, makers of Trix cereal.) “Did these ‘researchers’ not consider,” he demanded, “that Rabbit might be looking at the cereal?”

But could the Trix Rabbit defence save the Coco Pops monkey? And if not, who would be next? Should we be thinking about saving Tony the Tiger, who told us that Frosties were “Grrrr-eat!!!”?

Should the Honey Monster be afraid, despite an eight per cent sugar reduction and last year’s name change from Sugar Puffs to Honey Monster Puffs?

After all, Professor Brian Wansink, director of Cornell’s food and brand lab and co-author of Eyes in the Aisles said that he had in the last month been invited into the Department of Health to offer his views on tackling obesity. He said Trix Rabbit and friends may have been innocently looking at the cereal bowl, “but regardless of the intent, their eyes are more likely to point at the little kid’s.”

But when we suggested the eyes follow you round the room, like a cereal-themed horror film or a “good” painting in an art gallery, Professor Wansink burst out laughing: “Like the Mona Lisa of cereal boxes?! I wouldn’t say that. That’s crazy.”

In fact Professor Wansink was supportive of Coco – who seemed to be glancing sideways on our box. “If your best solution is to point at a cartoon monkey,” he said, “then you have serious creativity problems. You are effectively telling parents ‘You are so incompetent this monkey has more influence on your kids than you do.’ And it’s kind of a shame if I have to blame a cartoon monkey for my inability to say no to my kids.”

Instead, Professor Wansink argued, parents should be “empowered” and told they control 72 per cent of their child’s eating decisions. Don’t hang the monkey, he said, hide it. “Pour the cereal from the box into a plastic Tupperware container. My kids have very little interest in it then, because it looks like dog food.” He didn’t like the idea of a sugar tax either: “Idiotic. When Denmark introduced a fat tax [in 2011] it backfired. People didn’t buy fewer chips, they just switched to the cheapest brands.”

This may have flown in the face of the advice of Public Health England. And the National Obesity Forum. And the Child Growth Foundation. And the British Dental Association. And others.

But in Professor Wansink’s eyes, Hunt was like the Coco Pops monkey: off the hook.

But would the Department of Health agree? (About Coco, obviously. There can be no doubting their admiration for Jeremy.) “I don’t want you saying things like ‘we are considering banning any particular character’,” said a spokesman. “We are looking at lots of evidence, and if some of that is to do with marketing, we will be making our recommendations in due course.”