Orville Redenbacher's full-size bags of popcorn are now reshaped so that, after popping in the microwave, the bag opens into sort of a serving bowl. Ads for the new Pop Up Bowl packaging proclaim "easier cleanup," "ready to share" and "the bag that needs no bowl." Although Mr. Tidbit wouldn't get all that excited about it, he freely acknowledges that this might be seen as a small advantage over the previous bags (which opened at one end, instead of along the long side, as the new ones do).That might be an advantage, except for one thing: The bag is smaller. A box of six of the previous needs-a-bowl bags of Orville's Movie Theater Butter variety, for example, weighed 20 ounces. A box of six of the amazing new Pop Up Bowl bags of the Movie Theater Butter popcorn weighs 17.4 ounces. There was 15 percent more popcorn in the old bags.

What madness! Mr. Tidbit didn't know what to make of Swiss Miss' new Marshmallow Madness cocoa mix, as Swiss Miss already offers both regular cocoa mix with marshmallows and Marshmallow Lovers cocoa mix "Now with 5x more marshmallows than Swiss Miss Marshmallow variety."

He felt obligated to buy all three versions and count the marshmallows. There are 10 (1-ounce) envelopes in a box of regular "with marshmallows" mix; each contains less than 0.1 ounce of marshmallows (about 20 tiny marshmallows) and almost 1 ounce of cocoa mix. There are eight (1-ounce) packets of cocoa mix in both of the more-marshmallowy versions, and eight separate (0.2-ounce) envelopes of marshmallows. In each version, those packets contain about 100 tiny marshmallows. The difference? The ones in Marshmallow Madness are in various colors.

All three varieties have 30 percent of the daily value for calcium per serving. In addition, Marshmallow Madness is enriched with 10 percent or more of the daily value of 13 other vitamins and minerals. Regular marshmallow and Marshmallow Lovers contain just one more: 4 percent of the daily value for iron.

AL SICHERMAN