Smartfood Popcorn Doesn’t Hit Like It Used To

One woman’s quest to figure out why her beloved white cheddar popcorn started to disappoint

Smartfood White Cheddar popcorn is the only snack I ever want. I mean this. I do not often crave sweets, and while I will happily accept chips and Cheetos and various Haldiram’s mixes, Smartfood is the only one that sends me into a focused stupor. I have regularly eaten entire bags of it — big ones, the ones meant for a whole family — while watching a movie. As a child, I’d beg my dad for it on every bodega trip, and he’d usually give in, because the whole idea was that Smartfood was the snack that was good for you. Or at least not the absolute worst. In an age of muted Snackwells and Crystal Light, what a revelation that something “healthy” also tasted so good.

And it did taste incredible, like biting into the sharpest cheddar and finding it to be all airy crunch. My cheeks puckered. My mouth watered. It took intense sucking to get all the powdered residue off my fingers. It was just so cheesy, somehow more so than actual cheese. Consuming each handful felt like quenching a thirst I didn’t know was biologically possible, like there was some dairy-forward opioid receptor the snack had single-handedly activated.

But then, something happened. It only occurred to me recently, after grabbing a few handfuls during a game night with friends. The zing wasn’t zinging; the sharpness was dull. My fingers barely had a dusting of cheese powder on them. The Miss Clavel in my brain awoke from her slumber — something is not right. I realized then it had not been right for some time.

At first, I assumed this is just what being 38 feels like. Is anything as good as it used to be? Perhaps Smartfood only tasted good because I could eat it by the fistful while watching Muppet Babies and I didn’t know what a calorie was and I didn’t have a job. I loved it with an intensity that feels impossible to achieve in adulthood, one only possible because I literally had nothing else to put my mind to.

But it wasn’t just me. I took to Instagram, posting to my stories that Smartfood was just not hitting like it used to. Immediately I received a deluge of responses, friends and acquaintances and colleagues agreeing that Smartfood seemed worse to them. “It’s so less sharp these days,” said one. “Even the texture feels off,” said another.

Rachel Ross first noticed that Smartfood tasted different in 2020, around COVID lockdown, when she stocked up on Smartfood for comfort eating. “It used to be really cheesy. Like Annie’s mac and cheese except in popcorn form.” It’s an apt description. Smartfood was founded in 1985 by Ann Withey and her then-husband, Andrew Martin, at a time when “natural” snacks were all the rage, and “whole-grain” popcorn seemed like a healthier alternative to potato chips. The couple sold the product to Frito-Lay in 1989, and used the money to start Annie’s Homegrown, of mac and cheese fame.

Everyone I spoke to said they became aware of the change to the flavor of Smartfood over the past few years. “I definitely noticed last year when I bought some on purpose, rather than being handed a mini bag at some event or hotel check-in, because I dismissed those as just being old or stale,” says Alyssa, who asked that we keep their last name private. “But even when I bought it, it was still less flavorful, powdery but not cheesy or sharp, just mostly dusty.”

“It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when I noticed that the taste had less bang,” says Nick Brennan. But whenever he eats it, “each handful feels significantly more bland than in my memory.”

Some fans, like me, were willing to chalk up any change to the inevitable process of aging. Calvin Kasulke, who says he ate a snack bag of it for lunch almost every day in high school, imagines “if I tried it now and it tasted different, I’d have a hard time discerning whether the popcorn had changed or I had, and whether or not it was just nostalgia for that reliable school lunch snack that was tricking me into thinking it didn’t hit the same.” After all, our tastes change over our lifetime; our taste buds literally shrink as we age. “I convinced myself it was just in my head, and it’s because I’m not a kid enjoying it anymore,” says Alyssa.

But it couldn’t be that all our tongues were deceiving us. Something had to have changed. I became determined to figure out what it was.

Even after Frito-Lay bought Smartfood in 1989, for a long time it was just Smartfood. It came in smaller or bigger bags, but it was the same yellow ear of corn, the same italicized font on a white banner, the same flavor the whole time. In 2012, Frito-Lay announced it was expanding the Smartfood line of snacks, adding new flavors for the first time in the brand’s history. Now there would be Buffalo Cheddar popcorn and Cinnamon Sugar popcorn, and a variety of corn chips. And in 2019, the Smartfood logo changed to feature a sleeker, minimal corn cob and a rounder font. Still, even as Smartfood came out with new flavors like Krispy Kreme doughnut and Kettle Corn in recent years, the original White Cheddar remained available.

But around the time these new flavors began showing up, people also started complaining that the flavor of White Cheddar was off. Three years ago, a thread on the r/snacking subreddit asked, “What happened to Smartfood popcorn?” The original poster wondered, “Within the last few years with regular Smartfood, there’s less flavor and [it] leaves your hands spotless, anyone notice this? Did they change the recipe and sacrifice flavor for cleanliness!?” There were 47 responses, not a ton, but everyone was in agreement. One person speculated manufacturers were using field corn meant for animal feed. Another suggested they all complain directly to Frito-Lay.

Relying on a corporation to provide your favorite food means you have no control over it. The company could fold, it could stop selling the product, or almost worst of all, it could change the recipe to produce an imitation of your beloved, like the Men In Black bug alien in his Edgar suit, ransacking your pantry as if he belonged there. The other problem with relying on a corporation for your favorite food is if it were to change, how would you know? Occasionally companies will crow about a changed recipe, like Chips Ahoy! announcing its use of a higher quality chocolate chip. But this is usually only when the change is something the company hopes is positive for the consumer. Most brands don’t want to publicize that they’re changing their products. Frito-Lay did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Eater. But we do have one tool: the ingredient list. And it offers us some clues.

Two years ago, a Reddit user posted a bag of Smartfood from 1987 to r/nostalgia. This was from before Ann Withey sold the product to Frito-Lay, when it was still a family business operating out of Marlborough, Massachusetts. Here’s the list of ingredients: “air popped popcorn, natural corn oil, aged cheddar cheese (pasteurized milk, salt, cheese cultures, enzymes), buttermilk, whey, salt, sodium phosphate.”

“Ingredients labeling was something that the FDA started requiring in the 1970s,” says Xaq Frohlich, associate professor of history at Auburn University and the author of From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age. Before that, the FDA kept its own standards of identity for different food products, and as long as your product followed that standard you didn’t need to disclose the specific ingredients. But consumers wanted to know what was in the increasing number of processed foods on grocery store shelves, and the labels were meant to allow people to make informed choices.

According to the FDA, on any food label, “the ingredients are listed in descending order of predominance by weight, with the ingredients used in the greatest amount first, followed by those in smaller amounts.” So we can glean from this that cheddar cheese is a prominent ingredient in the 1987 version of Smartfood.

Frito-Lay clearly knew it had a hit on its hands, because the company hardly changed the recipe. A package of Smartfood with a copyright of 1995 lists “popcorn, vegetable oil (corn, canola, and/or sunflower oil), cheddar cheese (milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes), whey, buttermilk, natural flavor, and salt.” This list swaps the order of buttermilk and whey and adds a small amount of natural flavor, but otherwise it’s pretty similar to the 1987 version. The ingredients remain the same in a package copyrighted in 2019, after the company updated the logo.

The bag I bought in early March 2025 says the information on the back was copyrighted in 2021, and its ingredient list significantly diverges from the 2019 version. Here’s what it lists: “popcorn, vegetable oil (corn, canola, and/or sunflower oil), natural flavors, whey, maltodextrin (made from corn), buttermilk, cheddar cheese (milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes), salt.” Cheese is now the penultimate ingredient — seventh instead of third, as it had been until now.

“The change in order suggests that they have had a change in the net weight between those different products. So it does suggest a formula change,” says Frohlich. Specifically, it suggests Smartfood began using less cheddar cheese, and more “natural flavors,” which Frolich says is a food term that tends to obscure more than it illuminates. Natural flavors are “very chemical, but they’ve been derived from natural things,” he says; Smartfood itself describes them as “obtained from essences or extracts of sources found in nature such as spice, fruit, vegetable, yeast, herb, plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products.” So, pretty much anything. Companies aren’t required to disclose what specifically they derive their natural flavors from, or what flavors they’re trying to mimic.

Then there’s the new ingredient: corn maltodextrin, an additive often used as a “bulking agent” in powdered foods. It’s also used as a carrier for natural flavors, which may evaporate if not mixed with something else. The presence of maltodextrin combined with the increased placement of natural flavors signals that more of the cheesy flavor in Smartfood is coming from processed flavoring agents, not cheese.

It’s clear we have a different Smartfood on our hands. But as to why Frito-Lay would change the recipe, there are fewer answers. Nutrition labels are written in a way that still protects a brand’s trade secrets. We may know the order of ingredients, but that doesn’t tell us how to make Smartfood ourselves. That’s because “the entire packaged food industry is really built around this idea that the food becomes the brand, and that you taste the brand,” says Frohlich. He brings up Coca-Cola, the mass-produced food with perhaps the most famously guarded recipe. It tastes like Coca-Cola. Frito-Lay wants you to taste Smartfood, not white cheddar cheese popcorn. And they want you to taste it regardless of how they make it.

Frohlich mentions a few reasons food companies have historically changed their product formulations. There might be new public concern about an ingredient that encourages a brand to remove it, like Steak ’n Shake deciding to cook its fries in beef tallow to appease those who are panicking about seed oils. The FDA may also change its labeling requirements. Over the years, the FDA has added requirements about labeling things like added sugar or trans fat, often spurring companies to change their recipes to look better to consumers.

Comparing the 2019 and 2021 bags of Smartfood, there are a few differences in the nutrition facts. In both, a 28-gram serving is 160 calories. The newer label has slightly less cholesterol, 1 percent of the recommended daily intake instead of 2 percent, and 15 grams of carbohydrates to the older label’s 13 grams. There’s also a change in sodium. In 2019, a serving had 240 milligrams and now it’s 200 milligrams.

In October 2021, the FDA issued industry guidance around voluntary sodium reduction goals. “Food companies usually try to reformulate their products before any change in labeling regulations becomes official, to minimize the perception that their product had to be changed,” says Frohlich. “That said, this was a voluntary guidance and not an FDA requirement.” And while Smartfood’s sodium went down, both amounts were within the FDA guidelines.

Then there’s the ever-present culprit: the supply chain. Often formulation changes happen “when suddenly one ingredient becomes really expensive or really hard to source in a consistent way,” says Frohlich. We don’t know where Frito-Lay sources its cheddar cheese, but it’s reasonable to assume that a perishable ingredient like cheddar cheese is more expensive, and may be subject to more supply chain issues, than natural flavors made in a lab and a corn byproduct that comes pretty cheap. Even if an ingredient is not difficult to source, saving money is always appealing.

In 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe how tech companies like Amazon launch with a quality product, and then once they’ve achieved a monopoly on the market, slowly make things worse and worse after customers have made a habit of using them. The word has since come to describe all the ways capitalism and the pursuit of endless growth have made things worse for consumers, who have ever-fewer choices. And even if a company changes its product because of factors beyond its control, it can be hard to not feel like the customer is getting the short end of the stick.

Frito-Lay crows that “Smartfood is America’s #1 selling popcorn brand based on 2024 retail sales data.” According to industry magazine Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery, “Ready-to-eat popcorn took in $2.1 billion in dollar sales for the 52-week period ending April 21, 2024,” with Smartfood leading the category at $571.1 million in sales. If you want white cheddar popcorn, you may find a bag of Wise or LesserEvil at the grocery store — it’s not a monopoly — but likely you’re getting Smartfood, whether it’s because it’s what you’ve always preferred or because it’s the one your store offers.

Frito-Lay can move around the ingredients and swap real cheddar cheese for cheddar cheese “flavor” because they already have you. What are you going to do, try another white cheddar popcorn you might like even less? The reason I and others assumed something was wrong with us is because we trusted Smartfood to taste a certain way. We had built up a lifetime of nostalgia and goodwill toward the brand, and were willing to keep going even if our tongues were telling us something was wrong.

And yet, there’s only so much power nostalgia can have in the face of reality. Ross says she’s stopped buying Smartfood as much, going instead for cheesier options like Garrett or Cretors, both of which list cheddar cheese as the third ingredient. Brennan is going in the opposite direction, opting for SkinnyPop, with the logic that if it’s going to be blander anyway, he might as well go for the brand with fewer calories. I now find myself buying LesserEvil or Bjorn Qorn’s signature flavor with cheesy nutritional yeast if I see it, or just making my own cheesy popcorn with shredded Parmesan.

But LesserEvil isn’t what lit up my heart when my dad unpacked it from the grocery bag. Bjorn Qorn isn’t what my friends and I shoved in our faces by the fistful during sleepovers. SkinnyPop isn’t what my wife picks up when I’ve had a bad day or gotten good news, both equally deserving of a special treat. I find myself still reaching for Smartfood, hoping that despite all the evidence, it really was me this whole time, that the next bag will be as sharp and messy as I remember. I’ll keep reading the ingredient list. Maybe one day, something will change again.