The baffling reason many millennials don’t eat cereal

washingtonpost ^ | February 23 at 12:51 PM | By Roberto A. Ferdman

[dennisw]

Few things are as painless to prepare as cereal. Making it requires little more than pouring something (a cereal of your choice) into a bowl and then pouring something else (a milk of your choice) into the same bowl. Eating it requires little more than a spoon and your mouth. The food, which Americans still buy $10 billion of annually, has thrived over the decades, at least in part, because of this very quality: Its convenience.

And yet, for today's youth, cereal isn't easy enough.

On Monday, the New York Times published a story about the breakfast favorite, and the most disconcerting part was this:

Almost 40 percent of the millennials surveyed by Mintel for its 2015 report said cereal was an inconvenient breakfast choice because they had to clean up after eating it.

The industry, the piece explained, is struggling -- sales have tumbled by almost 30 percent over the past 15 years, and the future remains uncertain. And the reasons are largely those one would expect: Many people are eating breakfast away from the home, choosing breakfast sandwiches and yogurt instead of more traditional morning staples. Many others, meanwhile, too busy to pay attention to their stomachs, are eating breakfast not at all.

But there is another thing happening, which should scare cereal makers -- and, really, anyone who has a stake in this country's future -- more: A large contingent of millennials are uninterested in breakfast cereal because eating it means using a bowl, and bowls don't clean themselves (or get tossed in the garbage). Bowls, kids these days groan, have to be cleaned.

"Convenience is the one thing that's really changing trends these days," Howard Telford, an industry analyst at market research firm Euromonitor, said last year.

[discostu]

People pay attention to what interests them. As I get older and the news gets more and more repetitive, I think this is like the 5th time in my life we’ve had an illegal immigrant crisis, I lose more and more interest in “hard” news. The only thing that ever really changes anymore seems to be the vehemence, we have the same arguments we had 5 and 10 years ago, only with a lot more name calling. Can’t really blame anybody for walking away from the whole thing. They’re well enough informed to know both sides are full of crap, anything after that is just redundant.

[JimRed]

I'm more of an omelet with cheese and some variety of dead pig person.

My cardiologist would not approve.

[Company Man]

At $4.50 for a box of carbs it is hardly a(n) economically reasonable investment.

[Billthedrill]

"If cereal was any good they'd sell it at Starbucks, and it wouldn't be named after a killer."

Words to live by.

I have never understood the attraction of chocolate-frosted sugar bombs slathered with cow excretions. Beer: it's what's for breakfast!