Rainbow sprinkles are making a comeback as a cool addition to everything from cupcakes to gourmet cheese squares. In 1989, Pillsbury released funfetti cake mix that was basically white cake mix with rainbow sprinkles. When baked in the oven, the sprinkles melted into the cake mix and created flecks of color on the inside of the cake. 

Julia Moskin, a food writer for The New York Times, talked with us about her article “The Funfetti Explosion” and how the millennial generation and social media have helped rainbow sprinkles rise in popularity. 

On how she came across the funfetti trend:

Well, funfetti seems to be a synonym, virtually, for rainbow sprinkles. It is something that I was not familiar with until I went to a very, sort of, fancy farm-to-table restaurant in Brooklyn and the cheese course was this beautiful slab of very expensive Gorgonzola cheese covered with rainbow sprinkles, like crusted with rainbow sprinkles. And I thought: “This is a very strange thing.” So, I started googling rainbow sprinkles and when you google rainbow sprinkles, you come very quickly to funfetti. 

On how nostalgia is helping this trend resurface:

There’s a huge funfetti comeback, mostly because of social media and for, sort of, complicated nostalgic reasons because of the overwhelming numbers of millennials- who I hope that they are going to start calling themselves “Funfettials” or the “Funfetti Generation”, so, that is what has made funfetti so popular. You can see so many images on sharing sites like Pinterest, like Instagram, partly just because, of course, rainbow sprinkles are very photogenic and many things in the ordinary baking world like sugar cookies or pound cake, possibly they don’t look as interesting as people would wish, when the main goal of making them is posting them.