🏆 Pop-Tarts Bowl trophy: Behind the scenes

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Shortly after Iowa State‘s win in the 2024 Pop-Tarts Bowl, Cyclones receiver Jaylin Noel, in a celebratory mood, went to grab the game’s trophy to lug it home. But this trophy is different from any other and, as such, required Josh Price, an engineer who helped build the thing, to deliver some safety instructions. Noel wasn’t interested.

“He was like, ‘It’s a freakin’ toaster, man,’ and ran out of the room,” Price said.

With that, Price couldn’t argue. Because the Pop-Tarts Bowl trophy is indeed a freakin’ toaster.

The Pop-Tarts Bowl debuted as a genuine sports phenomenon in 2023, when the big shiny trophy — a football with slots holding fake Pop-Tarts — was unveiled, or rather, unwrapped. People went nuts, like they do for everything about this game, from the edible mascots to this year’s helmets with sprinkles sprinkled in the stripes. In the week after the Pop-Tarts Bowl in 2023, Kellogg’s sold 22 million more Pop-Tarts than they had the week before the game.

“I’m not going to pretend that this was the plan the whole time, but I think we had the right bones in place because we had the right approach,” said Matt Repchak, the chief marketing officer at Florida Citrus Sports, which operates the bowl along with the Cheez-It Citrus Bowl. “We’re not the Rose Bowl, we’re not one of the biggest games in the college football calendar year, but we’re always going to be fun to watch.”

But after the trophy reveal, there was one constant question. And when you’re a bowl geared around social interaction, you pay attention to the internet’s questions.

“The first question people asked was, ‘Is it a real functional toaster?’ And that persisted,” Repchak said. “We didn’t anticipate the lightning in a bottle that that brand created.”

In 2023, the trophy was not a functional toaster. So, the bowl set out to fix that problem. Pop-Tarts, naturally, had a relationship with a giant appliance maker, GE Appliances, which makes toasters. So, in the fall of 2024, when discussions went from “what if” to “could we?” they recommended the company’s FirstBuild lab on the University of Louisville campus, a microfactory where consumer appliances are dreamed into existence. It was about six weeks to game time.

No one knew if it was possible, but if it was possible, they came to the right place, a laboratory with all the tools possible to create gadgets and gizmos: 3D printers, fabrication machines, lasers, and just the right number of geeks excited to take on any challenges, even if it’s a football trophy meant to warm hearts and Pop-Tarts.

That’s where Price entered the picture. By day, he’s one of those makers who works for FirstBuild, which has produced appliances such as the Opal countertop nugget ice maker. Normally, the team in Louisville is trying to concoct things that land in consumers’ kitchens, like their current project, an appliance that automatically feeds your sourdough starter, or a $479 mushroom fruiting chamber to grow your own — not those kind, they say — at home.

He was issued a challenge: Make a trophy a toaster, and a toaster a trophy.

“It all came out of, ‘This is a silly thing, who can do the silly things?'” Price said. “And they were like, well, Josh is used to doing stupid things on the internet. Let Josh do it.'”

It was part of a career twist Price, even as a former YouTuber and showman, never saw coming. His background was mostly in how-tos, DIY projects or educational videos. Now he was not only engineering an appliance, but designing a trophy it fit inside.

Price used a CAD (computer-aided design) station to mock up a design based on the existing trophy. He stripped a toaster down to its bare minimum and figured out how much room he’d need. Then he used the exact specifications for an NCAA football and 3D printed it, but everyone told him it didn’t look right. Too pointy. Untethered from reality, he realized he could veer from exact replicas and began asking the really important design questions. Like: Since he can’t put the lever on the front like a toaster at home, should it have a giant slot-machine-type arm for maximum cheesiness? Should there be an “insane mode” to launch the Pop-Tarts really high?

“The YouTuber in me was like, I’ll launch ’em into the cheap seats,” Price said.

But alas, at every turn, there were marketing and legal people reminding him they’re in the appliance business, and it’d sure be nice if the item they were creating functioned like the ones they were selling. Nobody wants their Pop-Tarts launched across the kitchen by a toaster at home. So Price dialed it in, manually bending springs to make sure that there was just enough “popping action” for the big reveal.

And he settled on a really simple, elegant little lever on the back, then mapped out how to hide all the part lines and screws, and where to run power cords. They got the original Pop-Tarts trophy and disassembled it and figured out how everything would fit with the base. Then they had to get to work actually creating the pieces in-house with just weeks to go. And they had to make two of them. One for the bowl and one for the winning team.

Price uploaded his models to their CNC machine — that stands for computer numerical control — which could precisely cut and shape materials. In this case, it took 300 pounds of large aluminum blocks to create the two halves of the two footballs so they’d be strong enough to withstand the travel demands of a trophy. Each one took two weeks for the machine to produce them; then they produced the laces as a separate piece, so they could be removed. The pieces all had to be polished by hand, and that hand belonged to Will Roberts, an engineering lab technician.

“Will set up in the back corner for the last two months, just polishing, polishing, polishing,” Price said. “I like to think I’m very protective of this thing. No one is more protective than Will. If you see somebody get too close to the trophy without gloves on, he’s coming at you with throat chops.”

Inside, they put the toaster. Even though the piece that holds it is not visible to the public, it’s covered in the same Pop-Tarts trademark sprinkles pattern that’s on the helmets and the game’s sidelines. No details were spared. When the time came to hand their baby over, a bowl official showed up with a duffle bag and the FirstBuild crew nearly fainted. But the bowl officials assured them of their love and care, including purchasing an extra plane seat and strapping the 77-pound trophy in with a belt extender for the flight from Louisville to Orlando.

Then came time for its big debut with Price acting as the trophy’s shepherd for the game. He warned everyone that a 90-second toasting time may sound short, but when you’re on live TV, it would feel like an eternity.

So when it made its first appearance on-site during a shot in the booth before the game, announcers Tom Hart and Jordan Rodgers riffed while waiting. Then, TV magic — or a critical malfunction, depending on who you ask — happened. The Pop-Tarts launched straight out of the toaster and onto the floor. “Five-second rule!” Rodgers announced.

“It had never done that until that moment,” Price said. “It just spit them on the floor and they thought it was great. Everybody was like, ‘Oh, we’re going to break the internet.'” The texts flooding his phone were vastly different. The Pop-Tarts and TV people were amped. The brand people and his fellow engineers were breaking down launch angles and wondering if the trophy was tilted. He found himself in a conference room, frantically adjusting springs.

Price’s day was off to a wild start. The battery they positioned in the base, in case they couldn’t plug the machine in, got lost. He spent the entire game trying to find it and eventually did. Then when it came time for the on-field trophy presentation, the broadcast was ready to broadcast the big toast.

ESPN’s Cole Cubelic dropped two cinnamon roll Pop-Tarts in, announcing that it was Iowa State coach Matt Campbell’s favorite flavor, then pressed the lever, and waited. And waited. That 90 seconds Price had warned about was upon us.

“Come on Pop-Tart,” Cubelic said, vamping. “Get outta there.” Everyone lost interest. The attention soon turned to the giant Pop-Tart mascot, who had climbed upon a massive toaster.

Price watched from afar as the warm toaster pastries popped up out of the trophy just right. He may have been the only one who saw it. “I was in the sea of people laser beamed on that trophy,” Price said. “It popped and I’m like, ‘YAY!’ Then the confetti cannon blasted me in the side of the head. So any short-lived joy that I had from that moment was all by myself. Also, I know where not to stand this year.”

After all the action had died down, Price was able to relax. “There were very few moments of realization of like, oh, this is a silly thing that people are liking,” Price said, until afterward, when he realized it had been exactly what everyone wanted it to be. And then, Noel and the freakin’ toaster were gone, but Repchak was trailing.

“Guys, for all of our sakes, please,” he said. He was pleading with the Iowa State media relations team, which assured him they’d read all the directions and would follow them. “That’s the story of the Pop-Tarts Bowl, I think. I had to worry about educating a college sports information department on how to properly use the toaster that we’ve given them as an award.”

Repchak sees these entertainment components as crucial for bowl season. The College Football Playoff has become the entire focus for many elite teams. To wit, Notre Dame opted out of this year’s Pop-Tarts Bowl after they felt snubbed by the CFP committee. But the bowl experience is still valuable to other programs.

Florida Citrus Sports has put a massive emphasis on entertainment value, and it has worked. Last year’s Pop-Tarts Bowl drew 6.8 million viewers on ESPN, more than the SMU-Penn State first-round playoff game (6.6 million).

“Are we putting on a good show for the television viewers at home?” Repchak said. “That’s the whole reason during the holidays people are turning on their televisions watching, and why the ratings are so good. And so what can we be doing to continue to make ourselves invaluable to college football?”

Repchak would like to see more giant brands lend their names to such shenanigans. The Duke’s Mayo Bowl had Flavor Flav dumping a mayo bath on the coach, with fans chugging jars of mayo in the stands. Repchak said he and his mayonnaise colleagues encourage one-upsmanship. The winning Holiday Bowl coach was doused in eggnog.

“Iron sharpens iron, right?” he said. “If there’s some great thing that other bowl games are doing, it’s going to make us go back to the drawing board and think about how we can raise the stakes.”

The FirstBuild lab considers the trophy one of its favorite achievements. In its role as an incubator, the lab staff is expected to hit several benchmarks a year, including “graduating” its inventions into the GE Appliances lineup, like the smokeless indoor smoker they launched last year that won numerous industry awards at the show. For such accomplishments, they hang banners from their rafters, like a sports arena. Among their Time Magazine inventions of the year honors, one reads “POP-TARTS BOWL VIRAL TROPHY 2024.”

The trophy is so beloved it earned a place as a temporary exhibit at the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta from January to March of this year. “At the Hall of Fame, we have over a million pieces of memorabilia,” a spokesperson for the Hall of Fame said. “With just two years in, the Pop-Tarts trophy is synonymous with college football.”

Now a beloved piece of Americana, the team had a custom case made for this year’s trophy for their own peace of mind, since Price and Roberts still zoom in on photos to make sure there are no fingerprints or scratches on Iowa State’s. But they aren’t resting, either. This year, they were able to cut the toasting time in half, down to 45 seconds. Price manufactured his own springs so he’s not bending them manually. This year’s toaster can also be used more often. The science never stops.

What sort of legacy will the Pop-Tarts Bowl trophy have in GE Appliances’ line of historic inventions, including the light bulb? Price ponders as he looks admiringly over his creation.

“Incandescent bulbs are awesome,” Price said, “but that thing is awesomer.”