The Myth of the Instant Cake Mix

How to think about creative tooling in the new world of generative AI

Anyone either in the product world, or who has spent time in product-adjacent roles, will have heard the story of instant cake mixes. The legend goes that, in the 1950s, General Mills launched the now-famous Betty Crocker instant cake mix, but despite the overall trend toward electrification, modernization, and convenience, they didn’t sell well. After market research revealed that housewives felt guilty for using boxed mixes because they didn’t require enough effort, General Mills decided to remove powdered eggs and require customers to add fresh eggs themselves. Housewives instantly felt more invested in their confections and sales skyrocketed.

The cake mix allegory is frequently cited in the creative tooling industry. The bad news is that it isn’t true. But the good news is that the real story is even more illuminating.

I started to have my suspicions years ago when my daughter and I went through a cake baking phase. We always used Betty Crocker instant mixes, and I began to pay attention to what it was that made us proud of our work. I’d heard the instant cake mix parable, and I’d assumed it was true (if perhaps over-simplified), but it occurred to me that if my daughter and I had never cracked a single egg, I would not have felt any different about the cakes we made. Additionally, we always used canned frosting, and I never got the feeling that alchemizing icing by adding one or two magic ingredients would have increased our personal investment. Finally, given that 1950s housewives don’t exactly account for a meaningful economic demographic anymore, I wondered why we still add fresh eggs today — why the reign of powdered eggs hadn’t been triumphantly restored, and a new line of even more frictionless cake mixes introduced beneath the banner, “NO EGGS REQUIRED!”

As my daughter and I discussed our process, we realized that the things that made us proud of our work were the originality of the ideas we had, the pans we used, how carefully we shaped the cakes after removing them from pans, the methods we discovered to prevent them from sticking (wax paper and either Pam or Crisco), and both the frosting and the techniques we used to apply it (namely freezing the individual layers so that they wouldn’t peel and flake beneath the viscous frosting).

Newly skeptical of the Betty Crocker instant cake mix legend, I decided to do some research, and that’s when I discovered:

• Betty Crocker instant cake mixes sold quite well before the powdered eggs were removed, and the user study was conducted in response to sales plateauing, not because they hadn’t been selling at all.
• The debate between powdered and fresh eggs long predated the market research that supposedly gave rise to this iconic marketing epiphany.
• Adding fresh eggs to instant cake mix makes cakes taste better since, even with today’s food science, powdered eggs are objectively disgusting (we’ve all had them in the lobbies of cheap hotels and tried to cover up their inadequacies with butter, salt, pepper, ketchup, and/or Tabasco).
• Powdered eggs tend to reduce a cake’s shelf life which, getting back to the previous point, would only be a problem if the taste were somehow compromised since any reasonable cake left out among any reasonable family (or collection of coworkers) should, in any sane world, be gone long before its shelf life could be called into question.
• Powdered eggs increase the propensity for cakes to stick to their pans, and anyone who has experience baking knows that getting layers out of pans in one piece is most of the amateur cake-baking game.
• Pillsbury did not remove powdered eggs from their mixes, but sales of all instant cake mixes went up after the market research was conducted — not just sales of General Mills’ mixes.

But if it wasn’t the ingenious insight of requiring customers to add fresh eggs to instant cake mixes that accounted for the auspicious change in Betty Crocker’s fortunes, what was it? From what I can tell, it was some combination of:

1. Marketing campaigns that emphasized other aspects of the cake-baking process like icing and decorating.
2. Women thinking differently about their roles as wives and mothers, and as a result, spending less time in the kitchen (and therefore being more open to the convenience of instant cake mixes).
3. Instant cake mixes being used increasingly in baking classes.

That’s not to say the switch to fresh eggs didn’t have any effect whatsoever, but isolating it as the sole reason why instant cake mixes didn’t go the way of the electric can opener is clearly reductive — especially given the fact that adding fresh eggs significantly impacted what I think we all can agree is the most important product variable: the cake’s taste.

Cake Mixes and Movie Trailers

Betty Crocker once again came to mind while I was making a trailer for a short story I wrote called CAGN (pronounced kay-gun).

I feel both pride and ownership over those sixty-seven seconds, but not because of the prompts I used to generate either the initial images or the video (perhaps the rough equivalent of adding eggs — something that must be done to get decent results, but not something highly differentiable). Rather, the pride I feel comes, first and foremost, from the story itself, and secondly, from the work I put in in Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, and Audition (perhaps the rough equivalent of the icing and decorating). But what I find most compelling about the CAGN experiment is that I was able to turn something that previously existed entirely as words into something multimodal and more experiential — an artifact that I can share, and that will hopefully inform and guide the feature film adaptation.

At a high level, even the apocryphal version of the Betty Crocker story conveys something important: users need to be able to put work into the things they create in order to feel ownership and experience pride. But, as is usually the case in the product world, details matter. Specifically:

• Cake decorating is much more fertile ground for pride and ownership than adding eggs since it’s not possible to get better at egg-adding, nor are one person’s store-bought eggs meaningfully superior to someone else’s.
• When certain behaviors or features become more broadly accessible, users find other ways to invest their time and creativity in order to make their work stand out. It’s much better to focus on enabling those capabilities than on artificially adding friction back into a process.

Not only have I been telling stories for most of my life, but I’ve now spent over twenty years honing my intuition around creative platforms and tooling. And I’ve been incorporating generative AI into workflows since 2018 (back in the GAN days — long before “generative AI” was even a term). So far, I’ve seen no evidence that, in the new world of AI-assisted tooling, we need to appeal to user experience placebos — tricks and illusions to make users feel more invested in generative AI workflows. In my experience, our energy is far better spent making sure that users remain firmly in control of the creative process, and that the technology works for real-world creative workflows. Instead of one-click solutions, the goal should be providing a path toward proficiency and mastery.

Creativity is far more than the culmination of rote mechanical processes that appear to give rise to a desired outcome. Although the ways in which we apply it have evolved over time, it has always been true that craft matters, and it is only through some amount of struggle that any of us can truly experience ownership and pride.