General Mills’ Betty Crocker Gluten Free Dessert Mixes Named a Finalist in the Edison Best New Product Awards

Today General Mills’ Betty Crocker Gluten Free Dessert Mixes was named a finalist in the 2010 Edison Best New Product Awards.

The Edison Awards, a peer-review honor similar to the Oscars, are voted on by roughly 2,000 members of the not-for-profit Marketing Executives Networking Group, which includes America’s top executives and academics. The awards symbolize the persistence and excellence personified by Thomas Alva Edison.

Betty Crocker was the first national brand to launch gluten-free brownie, cookie, and cake mixes in traditional grocery stores. This innovative line of products satisfied gluten-free consumers’ previously unmet desire to find great tasting, affordable and easy-to-prepare desserts that they can enjoy with their families and friends. Since the gluten in wheat flour provides the structure for traditional brownies, cookies and cakes, creating dessert mixes without gluten is a significant and remarkable technical achievement. Once the company successfully created a winning product, an insightful marketing campaign centered on social media drove both awareness and support for the launch.

The Betty Crocker Gluten Free Dessert Mixes is a finalist in the Consumer Packaged Goods – Food Segment, one of more than 10 categories in the Best New Product Awards.

“Innovation is more important now than ever,” said Sarah Miller Caldicott, great grandniece of Thomas Edison and chair of the Edison Awards steering committee. “The finalists we announced today are the moving parts in the engine of economic growth. They inspire people to think outside the box and improve the lives of people around the world.”

The winners of this year’s Edison Best New Product Awards will be announced on April 29, 2010 during the 2010 Edison Awards Ceremony and New Product Showcase in New York.

The 2010 Edison Awards are sponsored by TV’s Discovery Channel, Google, The Nielsen Company, and Strategyn. The Edison Awards are also associated with The Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey.

About Betty Crocker
Since her creation in 1921, Betty Crocker has been one of the strongest brand icons in the food industry. A brand associated with quality and trust, Betty Crocker and the red spoon symbol appear on more than 300 General Mills products including ready-to-spread frostings and mixes that make some of the country’s best cakes, brownies, cookies, muffins and other baked goods. As a pioneer in the dessert mix category, General Mills was one of the first companies to introduce layer cake mix in 1947; it did so under the Betty Crocker name. This started a revolution in baking, providing homemakers with a convenient, reliable way to replicate the quality and taste of “homemade” without the hassle.

About General Mills
One of the world’s leading food companies, General Mills operates in more than 100 countries and markets more than 100 consumer brands, including Cheerios, Häagen-Dazs, Nature Valley, Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Green Giant, Old El Paso, Progresso, Cascadian Farm, Muir Glen and more. Headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, General Mills had fiscal 2009 global net sales of US$15.9 billion, including the company’s $1.2 billion proportionate share of joint venture net sales. Visit GeneralMills.com.