What's The Difference Between Regular Betty Crocker Cake Mix And The 'Super Moist' Options?

The first Betty Crocker cake mix was an old-school ginger recipe that helped revolutionize the concept of convenience products in home baking. Nowadays, when you browse the boxes of Betty Crocker cake mix at the grocery store, you'll notice that many of them carry the "Super Moist" label. What sets Super Moist apart and is it, in fact, a worthy cake mix? To get the answer, we looked to an FAQ from General Mills that states Betty Crocker Super Moist cake mixes have pudding in the ingredients. This was in answer to a question asking about adding pudding powder to the mix, a popular hack to amp up boxed cake. Yet incorporating additional pudding into Betty Crocker Super Moist kits would compromise the structural integrity of the resulting cake.

We generally love adding pudding to boxed cake mixes, as the creamy dessert gives flavor and rich texture to our cakes, but Betty Crocker has preempted this popular hack by including it in its mixes already. Perhaps this is why Betty Crocker is often called out as the superlative supermarket boxed cake mix for both flavor and texture. Does this definitely settle the question of Betty Crocker being not only one of the oldest, but one of the best cake mixes available today? Not so fast — the Super Moist cake mixes in particular have come under fire in recent years as alleged shrinkflation burns its disappointing way through grocery store shelves.

Back in 2024, savvy Redditors noted that Betty Crocker Super Moist cake mixes had decreased in volume from 15 ounces down to 13. While the adjustments to the recipe — meant to make less mix produce a similar volume of cake via a new leavener ratio — were fine for the mixes' original purpose of baking cakes, this wreaked havoc for home cooks fluent in the best uses for boxed cake mix that go beyond that, like pretzels, pie crusts, and cookies. All of a sudden, old recipes using boxed cake mix were altered, since the volume of powdered mix wasn't the same. Did this lead to a dip in quality when it came to the cakes themselves?

A writer from Business Insider directly compared one of the older, heavier Super Moist cake mixes with a newer, lighter specimen and determined that the change did, in fact, cause an appreciable drop off in both the texture of the crumb and the mouthfeel of the cake itself. That said, the final conclusion was that your average home baker who only occasionally made cakes probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. What we can surmise is that, even having been hit by the shrinkflation stick, Betty Crocker's pudding-enriched Super Moist cake mixes still make a delicious cake. Very discerning home users, however, might want to keep an eye on the turnout of their older recipes using boxed cake mix, at least when it comes to a Betty Crocker mix (or another similarly affected product) they pulled off the shelf in the last couple of years.