Is ‘Unfrosted’ Based on a True Story? The Fascinating Pop-Tart History That Inspired Jerry Seinfeld’s Netflix Movie

The real story of the invention of Pop-Tarts is very compelling, but you won’t get to hear in Unfrosted, the new Jerry Seinfeld-directed movie that began streaming on Netflix today.

This absurd comedy was at one point titled Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story, but later shortened to simply Unfrosted, likely because of how little the movie has to do with the actual true story of how Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts came to be.

Seinfeld was clearly inspired by the history as a jumping off point—and indeed, includes some cheeky references to the real story in his film—but the director and co-writer of the film clearly wasn’t concerned with grounding the film in reality.

I mean, the climax of the movie features Hugh Grant storming the Kellogg Capitol, dressed as a Tony the Tiger version of the QAnon Shaman. This is not a movie to watch if you’re interested in actual history.

But if you are interested in the actual history, here’s a quick run down of the true story that inspired Unfrosted.

Is Unfrosted based on a true story?

Sort of. Unfrosted is “based on a true story” in the sense that yes, there there actual was a race between the two rival breakfast companies, Kellogg and Post, to make a marketable breakfast pastries in the early 1960s. But nearly all other details in the movie are made up.

What is the Unfrosted true story?

If you want to know the real story of how Pop-Tarts were invented, you can watch a very entertaining 40-minute History Channel special on the topic, from a 2023 episode of The Food That Built America.

According that History Channel show, Post was not based next to Kellogg in Battle Creek, Michigan—as you see in the movie— but in Tarrytown, New York. In the early 60s, Post product development employee Stan Reesman was given the task of coming up with something new for Post. He studied the Gaines Burgers dog food—a new form of “wet” dog food from Post’s Pet Food division, that didn’t require refrigeration—and from that, developed his own version of that dehydration process to work on a fruity jam filling. The goal? Create a dehydrated, shelf-stable pastry that doesn’t go stale. (At least, not at the rate a normal pastry would go stale.) He was also told by Post CEO Charles C.W. Cooke that he needed to find a way to make the product easy for kids to heat, without using the oven. And he did it: Reesman invented the Post Country Squares.

But Cooke, eager to announce their hot new invention, put out a press release about the upcoming Post Country Squares months before the actual launch of the product. While Reesman scrambled to figure out the logistics of mass production of Country Squares, Kellogg quickly put together their own rival, shelf-stable pastry. Post had inadvertently given its rival the tip-off that Kellogg needed. Kellogg’s then-executive William LaMont, hired Bill Post—then working for the cookie company Keebler, not yet owned by Kellogg—to essentially steal Stan Reesman’s idea.

Of course, Bill Post didn’t know exactly how Reesman had pulled off the Country Square, so he was forced to experiment as quickly as possible before the Country Square hit shelves. One of these failed versions of the eventual Kellogg Pop-Tart reportedly was “exploding” in the toaster, due to the expansion of water inside the pastry filling—a detail that is played up to the extreme in Unfrosted. The addition of little “docking holes” on the pastry allowed the steam to release while it cooked, solving that problem.

Country Squares still hadn’t made it to market—”They kept fooling around with it in our labs,” Reesman told The Chicago Tribune in 1994—and now Kellogg has a competitor pastry ready to go. Lamont named his product the “Pop-Tart,” inspired by the popular “Pop Art” movement led by Andy Warhol. The Pop-Tart beat the Country Square to market in 1964, and quickly sold out. So Post had the idea first and invented the first toaster pastry, but Kellogg won the marketing war.

This is not the story told in Seinfeld’s Unfrosted movie. Seinfeld’s character, Bob Cabana, is loosely based on William Post. (The name change makes sense—it’s confusing that the guy working for Kellogg has a last name of “Post!”) You’ll see a few references to the real story in the movie. But Unfrosted erases Stan Reesman from the story entirely. Melissa McCarthy’s character—a NASA scientist hired to help Kellogg create the Pop-Tart—is nicknamed “Stan,” likely as an homage to Reesman. And even though Kellogg is arguably the “bad guy” in the real story, Unfrosted eliminates the conniving business side of this story. Instead, Post the villain, despite the fact that they invented the pastry first.

Many of the people in Unfrosted are based on real people: Majorie Post (played by Amy Schumer in the movie) was indeed a notoriously wealthy socialite, Thurl Ravenscroft (played by Hugh Grant) is the name of the real actor who voiced the animated Tony the Tiger, and Nikita Krushchev (played by Dean Norris) was the real First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. But none of those people were significantly involved in the creation of the Pop-Tart.

Unfrosted cherry picks these details from real life here and there. But for all intents and purposes, it’s a fictional movie. If you’re curious to know the real history of the Pop-Tart, I suggest watching Season 4, Episode 1 of The Food That Built America, which is available to stream with a cable login on The History Channel website.