Kraft covers up

For its Post Honeycomb cereal, Kraft Foods launched a promotional tie-in last December featuring the teen stars of Nickelodeon's "Kenan and Kel" comedy program.

But the promo hit a snag within weeks when Northfield, IL-based Kraft had callers claiming that in the back-of-the-package graphics, the teens appeared to be flashing gang signs. Kraft responded by covering the questionable area with a label applied at its plants by hand. "To avoid confusion, we decided to put a label on the packages we had in our control and we stopped shipping any additional packages that had the photo," says Kraft director of corporate communications Kathy Knuth. She also notes that the original image was supplied by Nickelodeon, and that a new and improved image of the two teens is now being used to produce the cartons. Kraft isn't saying what the incident cost or exactly how many cartons were involved. "Maybe a couple million had a label applied," says Knuth.

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