Conflict, ambition, betrayal — three emotions you may not instinctively associate with America’s sweetest breakfast offering, the Pop-Tart. Yet in Jerry Seinfeld’s feature directorial debut, Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story, the genesis of Kellogg’s rectangular snack is not only exciting, it’s hilarious.

The year is 1963, in the serene town of Battle Creek, Michigan. At the Bowl and Spoon Awards, Kellogg’s sweeps another year’s top prizes for their crunchy boxed wares. All seems right in the world. Enter Post, Kellogg’s bitter rival, who appears to have something nefarious up its sleeve. Soon the two morning meal monoliths degenerate into a ruthless race to originate the breakfast pastry.

“My first memory of Pop-Tarts is once I tasted [them], I assumed they would not continue to make other types of food, that it would no longer be necessary to eat anything else,” Seinfeld says of the breakfast pastry, which has recurred in the comedian’s stand-up sets. In crafting the visual world for Unfrosted, Seinfeld hopes to relay the joy he first experienced with the snack: “I want this to look like a box of cereal. I want you to feel that happy feeling in the morning when you go for your cereal.” Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story, which Seinfeld co-writes and stars in as fictional Kellogg’s leader Bob Cabana, boasts an unrivaled cast, including Melissa McCarthy, Jim Gaffigan, Amy Schumer, Max Greenfield, Christian Slater, Bill Burr, Dan Levy, Fred Armisen, James Marsden, Sarah Cooper, and Hugh Grant as a disenfranchised Tony the Tiger. 

“All of a sudden this new idea of a toaster breakfast pastry comes on the scene, which threatens their entire empire because they don’t know how big this thing could get. What if people stopped eating cereal? What if people stopped needing milk? I mean, it explodes the whole world. They didn't know how big the Pop-Tart could be,” says Seinfeld. “We love the idea of grown-up men in suits talking about cereal all day and the silliness of how they look — it just seemed like a fantastic world to be in.”