It’s garbage day one morning in 1963 in Battle Creek, Michigan. While he’s on his way to work, a Kellogg’s employee named Robert Cabana sees two kids climb straight into a dumpster. They’re happily shoveling breakfast pastries down their maw, cheeks ruddied by the strudel’s crimson sludge. It’s trash, Cabana tells them. “Is it?” the girl responds. “Or is it some hot fruit lightning the man doesn’t want you to have?” She hands it over to Cabana, and one bite results in sensory euphoria: He’s never tasted anything like it.
Cabana (Jerry Seinfeld) wasn’t a real person — he is a loose approximation of the recently-deceased William Post — and in real life, Kellogg’s probably wasn’t inspired to create the product later called Pop-Tarts by two ravenous children trawling through a sea of garbage. Despite such creative liberties, this scene is one of the few moments of levity that feels true, not forced, in Seinfeld’s directorial feature debut Unfrosted, out now on Netflix. The film draws from the actual Cold War-era arms race between two breakfast food giants, Kellogg’s and its rival Post, to revolutionize America’s morning meals by putting a flat oblong crust filled with jelly on supermarket shelves. Despite the comedic potential of its premise, Unfrosted’s diversions feel noncommittal, even half-baked.
Unfrosted comes at a time when corporate origin stories, particularly in the realm of food, seem to have seized the attention spans of studios. See, for example, Eva Longoria’s directorial debut Flamin’ Hot (2023), the story of the supposed inventor of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, a Mexican-American janitor-turned-Frito Lay executive named Richard Montañez (whose claims of origination have been disputed). Where Longoria sought to humanize Montañez by paying tribute to his struggles, Seinfeld takes a markedly different approach, trying to lean into his narrative’s inherent ridiculousness.
The story, told in flashback, begins in a time when Kellogg’s reigns supreme over the breakfast domain, outpacing the straggling Post. Kellogg’s mascots like Tony the Tiger (Hugh Grant) are populating American airwaves and doing grocery store meet and greets. Yet Post threatens to encroach upon Kellogg’s territory by developing Country Squares, the jammy vehicles of gastronomic wonder those kids were eating in the trash.
After getting wind of Post’s plans, Cabana and his superior at Kellogg’s (Jim Gaffigan) decide they’ll beat Post at this game. They enlist the help of Donna Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy), a scientist who defects from her NASA job to devise a new product in Kellogg’s creative laboratory. Kellogg’s assembles a ragtag team of quasi-celebrities — fitness dreamboat Jack LaLanne (James Marsden), the mustachioed Chef Boyardee (Bobby Moynihan), ice cream entrepreneur Tom Carvel (Adrian Martinez) — to help gin up interest in whatever will result from the exercise.
The body of this short but jaggedly paced film is peppered with moments of strained humor. Intrusive music cues anticipate punchlines, rarely letting the movie breathe. A recurring joke involves an oversharing Walter Cronkite (Kyle Dunnigan) who, after soberly summarizing the latest happenings in the breakfast wars, punctuates his broadcasts with laments about his misbegotten personal life. Here, as elsewhere during the film, Seinfeld’s directorial instinct is to linger on gags that don’t quite land, and this comes at the expense of more careful world-building. Before too long, Unfrosted begins to feel like a squandered comic opportunity.
Seinfeld’s choice of this subject matter for his first feature-length directorial outing might appear to be a natural fit for his comic sensibilities: Few are better suited than Seinfeld to find the absurdity in something as ubiquitous, even mundane, as a Pop-Tart. This very ethos was the beauty of his eponymous sitcom, still justly beloved decades after its end. What helped that show have such staying power was the fact that Seinfeld himself, in a starring role, was the straight man. When he delivered his lines, Seinfeld always seemed to be on the cusp of bursting into laughter, even when his co-stars rarely risked breaking character. That contrast allowed him to function as an effective audience surrogate. But this quality of his as an actor doesn’t work quite as well on the broader filmic canvas of Unfrosted, where he has few such foils: One gets the sense that many of his co-stars (particularly Amy Schumer as the snipingly — and unconvincingly — antagonistic Marjorie Post) are partaking in a skit whose conceit they don’t always buy.
The major exceptions are Melissa McCarthy and Hugh Grant. The role of the rogue NASA scientist Stankowski is very much within McCarthy’s wheelhouse — raucous, with the occasional dose of vulgarity — but she commits to the bit fully, even detecting sour notes in the script when men in power routinely look right past her, as if she doesn’t exist in this testosterone-heavy corporate world. Grant plays a high-minded Shakespearean actor imprisoned in a cereal mascot’s costume. He abjectly hates slogging his way through humiliating commercials shilling sugar. Grant cuts through the artifice surrounding him, becoming one of the few who feels like a flesh-and-blood person in a troupe of stock characters.
Grant’s surliness recalls his similarly effective appearance in another recent food-centric cinematic property, Paul King’s Wonka (2023), where Grant, as a crabby Oompa Loompa, brought that film’s cloudy fantasies back down to earth. What Seinfeld’s film lacks, disappointingly, is the sense of whimsy, even delight, that made a film like King’s so special in its treatment of food. One can debate the culinary merits of Pop-Tarts, but it’s difficult to deny that they’ve brought pleasure to many Americans throughout generations. But such joy feels regrettably absent from Seinfeld’s film. An early scene in which McCarthy and Grant’s characters engage in a barbed tiff suggests what the film could have been in more capable hands: They are two performers who believe in the product they’re selling.
Mayukh Sen is the James Beard Award-winning author of Taste Makers (2021) and the forthcoming Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star (2025). His work has been anthologized in three editions of The Best American Food Writing.
