When we heard about this, we were skeptical.  But no, after checking with the media department of Kellogg’s, it’s true.  Though it hasn’t made a decision one way or another, Kellogg’s, makers of “Corn Flakes,” is looking into the possibility of laser-etching individual corn flakes with the Kellogg’s logo for the U.K. market, in order to prevent it from being confused with competitors – most notably store-brand corn flakes.

It includes an announcement on the @KelloggsUK twitter feed which links to a photo (possibly a photo illustration?) of laser-etched corn flakes. 

'In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of own brands trying to capitalise on the popularity of Kellogg's corn flakes,' said Helen Lyons, lead food technologist at the company.

'We want shoppers to be under absolutely no illusion that Kellogg's does not make cereal for anyone else. We're constantly looking at new ways to reaffirm this and giving our golden flakes of corn an official stamp of approval could be the answer.'

It’s almost a good idea.  I mean, you could do that… or – and this is crazy, I know – but you could simply put the logo on some sort of cardboard box or plastic packaging, and then sell the corn flakes inside the box. 

Of course, we really shouldn’t laugh at this too hard.  A lot of IT groups out there are still using packet capturing as their network monitoring solution.  Now, packet capturing certainly has its place, but it’s usually more effective to take a full end-to-end look at network performance, and get details from netflow data, instead of inspecting individual packets at one particular place and time. 

There’s no plan to roll this out in the U.S., and this may all just be a publicity stunt that Kellogg’s UK will ultimately not follow through on.  The biggest problem, of course, is that the logos stop functioning when they are covered in milk – which is another way they’re exactly like packet capturing devices.