Posted on 02/24/2016 6:51:52 AM PST by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
What happened to the core eco-driven youth? The go-greeners?
Oh wait, washing a bowl and spoon uses water? Use a recyclable yogurt container instead? Other?
Because I do the dishes half the time. Their mom does them the other half.
*facepalm*
yep...can’t eat it on the run.
might have to sit at the table and encounter a family member, as it interferes with texting and surfing.
I think they prefer a beer and some of last night’s left over pizza.
Honestly I don’t like to eat anything that takes more than three steps to prepare.
Opening and closing the microwave counts as two.
Reminds me of the first time I saw pre-made PB&J in the store - apparently opening TWO SEPERATE jars and scooping the contents onto a piece of bread was just too damned hard for some people....
Don’t they want to grow up big and strong like Bernie Sanders?
At $4.50 for a box of carbs it is hardly a economically reasonable investment.
BS voters
Oh wait, I see the problem here....... You would have to wash the spoon and put the knife away in the knife drawer............ Way too much to deal with, let's go to a drive thru........!
Pour cereal in mouth.
Pour milk in mouth.
Chew.
Swallow.
Problem solved!
I’m a Realtor and I rarely have buyers in their 20’s that want a single family home. They want a condo etc because they don’t want to be bothered with yard work and upkeep.
My daughters are 22 and 19 and they never have cereal. Protein bars, granola bars, a squeeze yogurt are the preference.
I don’t eat cereals. Haven’t for most of my adult life. Hard boiled eggs work well and require minimum clean up (I came up with that one pre-millenial-ha). I eat yogurt and fruit from a rubbermaid container. (I have enough containers to get through a week)
Weekends are for a good Oatmeal.
The big take away from this article isn’t the cereal, but the shift to ordering more food pre-made and in a way that’s disposable. Cereal is a big casualty.
I make (except yogurt-I need a raw milk source) almost all of the food I eat from scratch. It freaks people out if they were from a home where cooking and knife skills weren’t modeled.
I have been not eating cereal since before not eating cereal was cool.
I’m more of an omelet with cheese and some variety of dead pig person.
I never was much of a cereal eater and now that I read the contents of food packages and decide what I will eat I have no reason to buy the stuff.
Too much crap in that sugar laden mess.
“If cereal was Amy good they’d sell it at Starbucks, and it wouldn’t be named after a killer.”
- Anonymous Millenial
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