Quaker Oats

Quaker bear on the porridge container in Episode 3945

Huffing and puffing in the yard

Quacker Instant Porridge

Gonzo's bedroom full of oatmeal containers

Quaker Oats is the flagship product and best known oatmeal line sold by the Quaker Oats Company. Sold in distinctive cylindrical packaging, Quaker Oats boasted the first registered trademark in the United States, their logo of a plainly dressed Colonial Quaker man. The company was also the first to offer mail-in premiums.

Quaker Oats has been available in different variations, including instant, and the company's other breakfast foods included Cap'n Crunch, Life cereal, and the various Aunt Jemima products. In the United Kingdom, prior to a 2006 sale, the company made Sugar Puffs.

In 1964, Jim Henson entered talks with Quaker Oats to sponsor the proposed series The Land of Tinkerdee, but they ultimately passed on the project. The following year, the company hired Henson to produce a commercial for Cinnamon Flakes Cereal, which went unfinished.

For a series of Sesame Street reruns on Saturdays or weekends airing on both commercial and public TV stations in 1970, The Quaker Oats Company "pioneered the Saturday morning grants with a $50,000 to Chicago non-commercial station WTTW last year." For 1970, it underwrote "weekend showings" in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Buffalo.

References

• A Quaker Oats style container of oatmeal, complete with an Anything Muppet Quaker, appears in the 1980 book Don't Forget the Oatmeal!

• Oscar the Grouch appears in Sesame Street Music Magazine Vol. 2, No. 7 asking, "Why does everybody want my favorite yucky oatmeal boxes? I hope they're not making something nice out of them!" The illustration accompanies instructions for how to use an oatmeal container to make your own drum.

• Big Bird fills Quaker Oat boxes with birdseed to make rattles in I Can Count to Ten and Back Again.

• Little Bert plays with an empty oatmeal can modeled after Quaker Oats in the 1987 book Good Morning, Little Bert!

• Herb Wolf enlists the help of Gordon and Uncle Wally to demonstrate how air moves things in Sesame Street Episode 2552. Using an obscured Quaker Oats box, "Gordo" and Wally huff and puff the object to one side of a table to the other.

• A canister of Quaker Oats sits on the breakfast table in the 1990 book Ernie's Window.

• Young Gonzo's bedroom is full of oatmeal containers (designed to resemble the Quaker Oats packaging, complete with Quaker) throughout the Muppet Kids book Gonzo's Big Mess.

• A different Anything Muppet Quaker (lavender this time) would adorn oatmeal packages on Sesame Street beginning in the 1997 song "Oatmeal Box." Examples include Episode 5124 and the 2021 book Bert & Ernie. The prop has been reproduced multiple times to help fill the shelves of Hooper's Store, best seen in a social media post by Rosita in 2024.

• Baby Bear's porridge container in Sesame Street Episode 3945 is adorned with a Quaker bear.

• Cookie Monster appears as the stand-in on a container in a "Yankee Doodle" poster for the June/July 2002 issue of Sesame Street Magazine.

• The Quacker Duck Man is the trademark of Quacker Instant Porridge in Sesame Street Episode 4325.

Anything Muppet Quaker in Don't Forget the Oatmeal!

Sesame Street Music Magazine

I Can Count to Ten and Back Again

Ernie's Window

Good Morning, Little Bert!

Containers stocked at Hooper's Store

Sesame Street Magazine