Remember the good ol’ days, when your parents would take you grocery shopping and they would let you pick out the cereal?
As a kid, this was pretty much as big a deal as it got.
Would you listen to your mom and go for the healthier choice of Cheerios? Or would you reach for the colourful box of Lucky Charms despite her wishes?
Well, it seems the days of cereal being a staple food item in our pantries is a thing of the past. (That’s right, cereal cafes be damed, no one’s drinking the milk from the bowl anymore.)
Cause apparently cereal’s popularity has been in constant decline since the 90s, with sales dropping more each year. And if the cereal industry was hoping that younger consumers would help it make a comeback, it looks like they’re out of luck, as 40 per cent of millennials think cereal is “inconvenient”.
Personally, that statement offends me; it suggests that millennials are lazy. But how could we be lazy? The Canadian Federal Finance report recently announced that this generation of millennials is the wealthiest they’ve ever been. So that obviously means we’re working our asses off, showing very few signs of laziness.
But hey, I guess the process of pouring cereal and milk into a bowl, eating it with a spoon, and then cleaning up the dishes afterward is simply too much work for some people.
As the New York Time reports, a recent survey conducted by Mintel, a global research firm, suggests that nearly 40 per cent of people born between 1980 and 2000 consider cereal “inconvenient to consume.”
So why have millennials turned their backs on cereal? Apparently they either don’t eat breakfast at all, or if they do, it’s typically outside of the home and consists of hot grains, smoothies, yogurt, or breakfast sandwiches.
The article also notes that the cereal industry has experienced a serious decline in recent sales, from $13.9 billion in 2000 to about $10 billion in the last year. I guess millennials can probably be blamed for this as well.
Perhaps if the cereal industry wants to re-attract its younger consumers, they’ll have to entice millennials to want to eat cereal again. Perhaps this could be achieved through discontinuing certain brands, or making them limited edition, to create a sense of nostalgia. Because if one thing’s for sure, millennials love to get nostalgic.
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