Pop-Tart Exclusive: 1 on 1 with marketing team behind viral bowl game

Even as the College Football Playoff has grown and expanded, bowl games remain a vital part of the college football experience. There were 47 bowl games for the 2025 season, including playoff games, but few have captured the nation's collective heart like the Pop-Tarts Bowl.

For those unfamiliar, the Pop-Tarts Bowl rebranded from the Cheez-It Bowl for the 2023 season and instantly became a hit. The hook: a live Pop-Tart mascot, with a different flavor each year, that gets put into a massive toaster at the conclusion of the game and is then promptly eaten by the players and coaches of the winning team.

If it sounds like something out of an Aldous Huxley novel, don't fret. It's actually way more fun than it sounds. Just take a look.

During the Big 12's Football Media Days, Echo From the Buttes had the chance to speak one-on-one with Sam Gardner, the Senior Director of Marketing and Communications at Florida Citrus Sports, the organization that helps put on both the Pop-Tarts Bowl and the Citrus Bowl. The latter has actually been around since 1946, making it the seventh-longest running bowl game in college football history.

Below is a transcript of the conversation with Gardner.

David Howman: Can you start off by introducing yourself and your role with Florida Citrus Sports?

Sam Gardner: Yeah, I'm our Senior Director of Marketing and Communications, so I oversee our PR and media operations, it's a lot of what I spend my time on. But we've got a team of five or six full-time staff that's on our marketing and communications team. We all kind of have input on marketing and promotion and branding and all that. But at the end of the day, dealing with media PR and ops is mostly what I do.

DH: So do you get to take credit for the Pop-Tarts mascot?

SG: (laughter) It's a very collective effort, I'll say. It's one of those things where there are a lot of people in the room when you start brainstorming that. It usually starts, basically the summer before, when you're working through what does the next step of this program look like? So, you've got people from Florida Citrus Sports, you've got people from the brand itself, which is owned by Mars Corporation. You've got agencies that work for both of those groups. So you've got a lot of creative people in the same room, on the same Zoom call, and you put together some pretty interesting ideas. And then you just kind of suss them out from there and see what's going to stick and what people... you hope that you get the reaction that we've gotten over the last few years, but it's not a perfect science of, you know, it's not a very straight line that we just follow. It's very reactive to what fans and people at the game are saying; it's a collaborative, year-round effort.

DH: Was it a surprise to you that people reacted the way they did to the Pop-Tarts mascot?

SG: You always hope that... you want to set the bar high. You expect a reaction because that's what your shooting for, but I think the level of, I guess, support that we've seen, the level of interest and excitement around the game and kind of year over year growth of that has been more interesting to see. I remember the first year when they were reporting earned media numbers after and it was something like two billion media impressions for the Pop-Tarts Bowl, which sounds crazy, right? And then Year 2, they tell us the number goes up and it's four billion or five billion, and this past year they said it's close to eight billion impressions. It's cool to see that people keep coming back for it.

DH: The other bowl that you work with, the Citrus Bowl, typically that's been between a Big Ten and SEC team. With talks of expanding the College Football Playoff, how might that change?

SG: Uh, I don't- I guess we'll all see, I guess, where that goes. You know, for this year all of the existing bowl partnerships are kind of just being extended for another year. We can't really say what the impact will be of the sixteen team playoff or the twenty-four team playoff, to be honest, until we know where that lands and what they decide to incorporate more bowl sites in that versus on-campus sites. Things like that, there are so many decisions in that world that are out of our hands. Our intent is to keep working with the Big Ten and SEC for as long as we can. You know, we've been doing the Citrus Bowl for the past eighty years, last year was our eightieth game and it's been a Big Ten/SEC matchup since 1993, I think was the first time we hosted those two conferences. So, it's been a strong partnership for three decades and our intent is to keep it that way. But we're all interested in where the playoff lands and how that impacts us.

DH: You mention seeing where things land. As the playoff has already expanded, some fans have debated whether or not those affiliated bowls have been diluted in value and reputation. Is that a concern for you is it more excitement for the opportunity to potentially be part of the playoff?

SG: More excited about the opportunity to be part of the playoff. We can't really control some of the other factors. What we can control is the show we put on and the experience we provide for the team that are playing in the game, whatever conference they're coming from or whatever the alignment. I don't, there's not a level of concern. For eighty years we've been doing the Citrus Bowl, and we've seen it change and grow in lots of way during that time. You go back to Year 1, and it's Catawba versus Marville, just to put it in context. And at that time, you would've never believed that the Citrus Bowl could be what it is today. So I think there will always be, there's always going to be a solution. We feel good about the history of the game, and the direction it's going. We're just eager, like everyone else, to see where the playoff settles.

DH: In talking about how bowls have changed over the years, one of those changes has been sponsors for bowls. The Citrus Bowl is with Cheez-It right now.

SG: We're not, actually. Not anymore.

DH: Oh, new this year?

SG: Yeah, new this year. As of this year, when they announce the bowl schedule for this year, Cheez-It is no longer the title partner of the Citrus Bowl, so it's just the Citrus Bowl. Now, that can still change between now and game day, but for the moment we're going to our roots, if you will.

DH: There you go. Well it was the Cheez-It Citrus Bowl for a few years, but there was also just the Cheez-It Bowl. From a marketing standpoint, how hard was that to navigate, making sure people still know what bowl game this is?

SG: (laughter) Yeah, it is kind of an interesting game to play. Funny enough, one year we had the Cheez-It Bowl and the Cheez-It Citrus Bowl in - they sponsored both games. So we've even had to deal with that kind of market confusion and what is now the Pop-Tarts Bowl used to be the Cheez-It Bowl, so that game kind of graduated to Pop-Tarts. It's definitely a challenge to have... any time you've got brands that are moving from one game to another, you've really got to be intentional about making sure people understand what's what. Thankfully, Pop-Tarts Bowl has made it very easy for people to understand what Pop-Tarts Bowl is and it created some interesting opportunities. The year we did both [Cheez-It Bowl and Cheez-It Citrus Bowl] games, it was - I don't know, I didn't find it harder that year, but it was just more. If anything, that was an interesting year. Cheez-It was a great partner.

DH: Do you have a favorite memory from each of the bowls you work with?

SG: Interesting thing for me, I grew up in Orlando, I grew up going to the Citrus Bowl every year as a fan. My dad and I would go pretty much every year. So, going way back, I remember going to my first Citrus Bowl was the 1998 Penn State/Florida game. I grew up a Gators fan so that was a huge deal for me to see the Gators play. So that's one that stands out as a fan. Now, in the last nine years that I've been working here... I don't know, I'd say that every year the Pop-Tarts Bowl keeps getting better. It feels like this most recent Pop-Tarts Bowl was honestly my favorite, even down to Kalani Sitake force-feeding himself a Pop-Tart on the stage at the end. (Laughter) It's recency bias, maybe, but this most recent was my favorite Pop-Tarts Bowl. As far as the Citrus Bowl, we've had some really great games over the years. I remember one of my first games I had, we had Notre Dame beat LSU. Miles Boykin had a one-handed catch in the rain to basically win that game. That always stood out to me just because it was a really great game. At the end of the day, we'll usually end up with four ranked teams in these two bowl matchups, so you're typically going to end up with good football. The consistency of that good football is something I can appreciate about both games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEbMMNDR_j4

DH: One last question, I saved the most important one for last: what's your favorite Pop-Tart flavor?

SG: My favorite Pop-Tart flavor is s'mores.

DH: S'mores?

SG: S'mores, yeah. When I was in high school I just remember I would always drive to school and I would just have them. Every day I'd have a Pop-Tart in the car on the way to school. If I have a full selection of all the flavors, s'mores is where I'm going.

DH: Do you heat it up? Do you freeze it? Just straight out of the bag?

SG: Raw. Straight out of the bag. (Laughter) I mean, there's no bad way to eat them, but I'm a purist. I just eat them how they come.