Answer: A Digital Code

If ever there was a sign of the times, perhaps this is it: after more than a century of hiding physical toys in each container of Cracker Jack popcorn mix, the company has phased out the practice in favor of including a baseball-themed mobile app download.

Now, instead of a small and inexpensive toy (like a decoder ring or whistle), there is a small sticker with a digital code that can be scanned with a smartphone and used to download a free mobile app to play with on a family’s smartphones and tablets.

The inclusion of the digital code isn’t the only move that parent company, Frito-Lay (a division of PepsiCo), has made to modernize the brand. In addition to the move towards digital toys, they also ditched the old Cracker Jack box design in favor of a more modern plastic bag. Perhaps their motivation was not as much to modernize the brand as to kill the colloquialism “came in a Cracker Jack box” to refer to something cheap.