A complete timeline of man’s investigation into ‘shrimp tails’ in his cereal (including a major plot twist)

A Californian man’s quest to find out if there were shrimp tails inside his box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch has captured the attention of cereal lovers across the world...

What started as a simple customer service question for writer and comedian Jensen Karp has turned into an online scandal, with accusations of a cover-up by the cereal-maker and plot twists that would make M Night Shyamalan proud.

It all started on Monday when Karp asked the company on Twitter why there were (what appeared to be) shrimp tails in his cereal…

A Cinnamon Toast Crunch (CTC) employee soon responded, asking him to send them a direct message to give more details about the incident:

After a few hours, the CTC account returned with an explanation for the discovery… apparently the objects were not shrimp tails but were actually “an accumulation of cinnamon sugar”.

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The account also insisted that there was “no possibility of cross contamination with shrimp” in the making of the box…

However, that answer didn’t satisfy Karp - who accused the company of trying to “gaslight” him over the discovery:

But then it gets even weirder… a few minutes after his discussion with the CTC account, Karp decided to take another look in the box and apparently found even more weird objects, including a small piece of string and a number of cereal squares with black marks on them:

And when his wife took a look at the other bag in the cereal family pack, they found what appeared to be a piece of dental floss in the bag…

Next morning - 23 March

After sleeping on the find, Karp decided to take his investigation to the next level on Tuesday morning by getting some of the cereal tested:

The incident had gone fully-viral by this point, sparking interest from major publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

In fact, the story had gotten so big that CTC had to release a statement on their official Twitter account in an attempt to calm customers’ fears…

The increased media attention also brought some more important details to light about Karp and his family - most notably that his wife is not just some random person but is actually actor Danielle Fishel (aka Topanga from the 90s sitcom Boy Meets World):

Anyway, back to Karp - whose investigation has now taken him to a laboratory for further investigation and, unfortunately, pest control…

Meanwhile, CTC is now apparently asking for him to send the cereal box to his local law enforcement - even though their official line appears to still be that the alleged shrimp tails are just sugar clusters…

As a side note, Karp seems to be a pretty interesting guy himself, as he had a minor rap career under the stage name Hot Karl and signed a million dollar record deal with Interscope in his early-20s.

Although his debut album never saw the light of day, it apparently included guest appearances from Kanye West, will.i.am and Redman.

He also had a hand in the early career of Chance the Rapper and gave the artist $5,000 to film a music video…

So that’s where we seem to be as of 10am this morning (UK time) - we’re sure there are more details to come.

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