Yankees Stadium Eliminates Cracker Jack
NEW YORK - The ballpark snack paired with peanuts in the stadium anthem "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" will no longer be around for the seventh-inning stretch at Yankee Stadium.
Cracker Jack has been replaced by the competing caramel popcorn Crunch 'n Munch at the home of the Bronx Bombers.
"Cracker Jack is a brand name," Yankees chief operating officer Lonn Trost told The New York Times for its Wednesday editions. "We're selling a caramel crunch that is the same thing as Cracker Jack."
Trost compared the difference between Cracker Jack and Crunch 'n Munch to "Frigidaire versus refrigerator, or aspirin and Bayer, or Jell-O and gelatin."
The director of hospitality at the stadium, David Bernstein, told the Times that the move was prompted by Cracker Jack's decision to make only bags, not boxes, of its snack, and said Crunch 'n Munch won a taste test.
"Baseball historians would say Cracker Jack and the Yankees belong together," Charles Nicolas, a spokesman for Cracker Jack's parent company, Frito Lay, told the Times, "and hopefully they'll be together again soon."
The makers of Crunch 'n Munch, ConAgra Foods, seemed to have no such hopes.
"We'd have no heartburn if Yankee fans started standing up in the seventh inning and singing 'Buy me some peanuts and Crunch 'n Munch" ConAgra spokesman Chris Kircher told the Times.
Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All rights reserved.