Currently browsing posts about: Cereals

From The Onion: “New Omnigrain Cheerios Made With Every Existing Grain On Earth”

From Wegmans, Ithaca:

Truth is stranger than satire.

Hoping to cash in on the current protein craze, General Mills has come up with this (thanks to Kasandra Griffin of  Upstream Public Health in Portland, OR,  for sending):

Cheerios Protein has 7 grams of protein per serving.  But it also has 17 grams of sugars.

I use sugars, plural, for good reason.  Here’s the ingredient list:

In case you can’t read this: Whole grain oats, cluster (whole grain oats, brown sugar, soy protein, lentils, sugar, corn syrup, natural flavor, molasses, rice starch, caramel (sugar, caramelized sugar syrup), salt, calcium carbonate, baking soda, color added, BHT added to preserve freshness), sugar, corn starch, honey, salt, refiner’s syrup, tripotassium phosphate, rice bran and/or canola oil, color added, natural flabor, brown sugar, vitamin E (mixed tocopherols) and BHT added to preserve freshness.

A trip to the supermarket also turned up these:

This one has 16 grams of sugars.

And here’s another.  This one only has 7 grams of sugar per serving.  How come?  Sucralose!

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

And just a reminder about protein: American consume roughly twice as much as needed.  Protein is not an issue in U.S. diets.

This is about marketing, not health.

I guess Cheerios SUGARS, Fiber One SUGARS, or Special K SUGARS PLUS ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS wouldn’t go over nearly as well.

I read about General Mills’s introduction of non-GMO Cheerios back in January, but didn’t get around to looking for them until this weekend.

I was expecting to see something like this (thanks Fooducate):

Instead, the information is tucked into a side panel. 

This may explain why General Mills is complaining that the non-GMO is not doing a thing to boost sales of Cheerios.  If anything, sales are “down somewhat.”

And here’s a good one: According to one professor, the non-GMO Grape Nuts and Cheerios are going to be less nutritious than the GMO versions.

Post Foods’ new non-GMO Grape Nuts (click here ) no longer include Vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin B12 or vitamin B2 (Riboflavin)*, while the new non-GMO Original Cheerios no longer have Riboflavin on the ingredients list (the old version has 25% of the daily value in a 28 g serving while the new version has 2% of the DV).

How come?  It’s hard to find non-GMO vitamins (who knew?).  Vitamins, it seems are often produced from genetically engineered microorganisms, or from microbes growing in fermentation tanks that are fed a nutrient mix that contains ingredients from GM sugar beets or corn.

Should we be worried about nutritional deprivation among Cheerios eaters?

Cheerios are essentially a vitamin pill wrapped in rapidly absorbable starch.

The ingredients: whole grain oats, corn starch, sugar, salt, tripotassium phosphate, wheat starch.

Everything else is added vitamins.

Personally, I prefer my cereals with no added vitamins (they taste bad).  And I doubt they make much difference to health.

Whether non-GMO will have a noticeable effect on sales of Cheerios remains to be seen.

If General Mills doesn’t advertise the change, it can’t expect non-GMO to boost sales.

Curious, no?

Food Navigator just did a report on cereal “blockbusters,” the top best-selling brands.

Numbers like these are so hard to come by that they inspired me to make a table.

I looked up some figures on advertising expenditures for specific cereals from Advertising Age, 100 leading advertisers (June 24, 2013).

Top selling cereal brands, July 2012-June 2013

*All numbers rounded off.  **All forms of Cheerios: $167 million

My conclusions:

• At least 8 of the top 10 are sugary cereals.
• At least 5 are targeted to children.
• Six of the top 10 are made by Kellogg.
• Advertising expenditures are roughly proportional to sales (Special K is an exception: not sure why).

Think about what that money could do if used to promote public health.

Can something like this be nutritionally revolutionary?

Kellogg has just launched this cereal with just 6 grams of sugars per serving—half of what’s in most other cereals aimed at kids.

It’s also lower in sodium, but everything else about it looks pretty much the same:

Will Kellogg put money behind this cereal and market it with the millions it spends to market Froot Loops?   Will it reduce the sugars in its other cereals?  Will other cereal companies do the same?

Or will Scooby Doo suffer the fate of Post’s no-added-sugar and otherwise unsweetened Alpha Bits introduced in around 2005?

Post put no money into marketing the cereal and dropped it after just a few months (Alpha Bits now has 6 grams of sugars per serving).

Let’s give Kellogg some credit for giving this a try.   I’ve looked for Scooby Doo in grocery stores but haven’t been able to find it.

I will watch its fate with great interest.

Update: Thanks to Cara for pointing out that with Scooby Doo, Kellogg adds a cereal to its portfolio that meets requirements of the WIC (USDA’s Women, Infants, and Children’s nutritional support program).  As Jessica, a Kellogg rep explains, “The benefit of this cereal is that it’s WIC eligible and boosts several vitamins and minerals, is low in fat, is a good source of fiber and vitamin D and an excellent source of iron.”

And thanks to an anonymous writer for pointing out that Scooby Doo is directly competing with General Mills’ Dora Explorer cereal for the lucrative WIC market, one that should amount to nearly $7 billion in 2013.  WIC specifies what the benefits can be used to buy.  Cereal companies want to be sure they are in that market.

It’s the (relatively) quiet season and I’m getting caught up on reports coming in.   Here are two.

1.  The Bipartisan Policy Center, a group founded by former cabinet secretaries, has come up with a plan to improve the health of Americans: Lots to Lose: How America’s Health and Obesity Crisis Threatens our Economic Future.   The Executive Summary is online, but the website is difficult to navigate and you have to log into Facebook to read the entire report.

The report calls on the public and private sectors to collaborate in creating healthy families, schools, workplaces and communities. Some of the recommendations are aimed at the food environment, rather than individuals, which is good.  And they are addressed to families, schools, workplaces, communities, and farm policy.  But like most such reports this one does not explain how any of its recommendations might be achieved.

2.  The Rudd Center at Yale has produced Cereal Facts, a study showing that cereal companies:

Increased media spending on child-targeted cereals by 34% from 2008 to 2011, mainly on the least nutritious products.

• More than doubled spending in Spanish-language media.
• Improved overall nutritional quality of 13 of 14 brands advertised to children by 10 percent on average.
• Sponsor TV ads that typically promote products containing one spoonful of sugar for every three spoonfuls of cereal.

Two more findings of interest:

• In 2011, the average 6- to 11-year-old saw more than 700 TV ads for cereals.
• Although General Mills and Kellogg do make nutritious products that are marketed to parents, they do not advertise those products to children.

Watch the video!

Marty Gitlin and Topher Ellis, The Great American Cereal Book, Abrams 2011.

I love cereal boxes, especially ones with egregious health claims, and I have a small collection dating back ten years or so.  I also, courtesy of Kellogg, have facsimiles of the complete set of Rice Krispies, All-Bran, and Froot Loops, dating back to the first year they were produced.   So I’m delighted to find this history of U.S. breakfast cereals, organized alphabetically by era starting in the 1860s, illustrated with pictures of each.  A encyclopedic nostalgia trip!

Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, Beacon Press, 2012.

Bobrow-Strain organizes this books by dream categories: dreams of purity and contagion, control and abundance, health and discipline, strength and defense, peace and security, resistance and status.  White bread does all this?  Indeed it does in this story of how “white bread became white trash.”  He begins by asking, “Is this stuff even food?”  He ends with the whole wheat phenomenon and “yuppie bread.”  This is entertaining history and an example of food studies in action: using food to talk about important issues in history and contemporary society.

Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, Beacon Press, 2012.