food product challenge: cereal

From the golden field to your breakfast table, grains are harvested and milled into whole grain flour. Then they are mixed with other ingredients like sugar, natural flavours (such as cocoa or honey flavour), water, vitamins and minerals, antioxydants to make the dough. Finally, we bake them. So you can see it takes a lot of care to transform whole grains into cereal, but it’s worth the effort. 

A health clinician accidentally spilled a wheat bran mixture onto a hot stove, creating what would come to be called Wheaties. (Its famous slogan, “Breakfast of Champions,” would first appear on a billboard for a minor league baseball team in Minnesota in the 1930s.) Rice Krispies, with its characters Snap, Crackle and Pop, soon became a close rival. 

Co-branding cereal was the game. Mr. T had his own, made from sweetened corn and oats and shaped like a T. (In advertisements, he pitied the fool who didn’t eat it.) Donkey Kong, Smurf-Berry Crunch and Cabbage Patch Kids cereals also appeared, along with the California Raisins, the claymation quartet that promoted Post Raisin Bran. 

We want our breakfast cereals to be tasty when they reach your breakfast table.  There's nothing complicated and fancy about making breakfast cereal, you could even make it at home! Read on for a healthy breakfast recipe you can make for yourself and the family. 

When the grain has been ripened by sunshine, harvested and then cleaned, it's brought to our factory. At most of our factories, we (mostly) mill it ourselves, as this cuts the time between the grinding of the grain and the finished product (about two hours!), so the flour is really fresh. And by doing our own milling, we only produce as much whole grain flour as we need - so no waste! 

How would you mill at home?

Well, you probably wouldn't grind the grain yourself - unless you live in a windmill! But the whole grain flour you use for your baking is going to be pretty similar to what we're using - only ours will usually be fresher. That’s because, where we mill it ourselves, it goes straight from the mill into the mixer. 

Before the milled grains are cooked, we mix the flour with water and other ingredients, including the vitamins and minerals we add, and cook the mix into a dough vacuum blender to create a dough. (If we're going to coat the finished product later on, we keep back a few additional ingredients like chocolate or cocoa powder.)

How would you do it at home?

This is the whisking, mixing, beating part of the home baking process. That bit where you throw all the ingredients into a bowl and put in some serious elbow grease! If you're baking bread, it's where you knead that gloopy goo into a soft, supple dough (or save yourself the hard work and toss it all into the breadmaker. Whatever would grandma say?!). 

Then the dough goes through one of our special machines - think pasta press or sausage maker - to create the cereal shapes you know and love: hoops, balls, flakes, cookies and clusters. And did you know? SHREDDED WHEAT is made by literally shredding the wheat using rollers with grooves on!

How would you do it at home?

When you get out the cookie cutters to make your favorite biscuits or gingerbread people, you're shaping your dough, just like we do.

Finally, we put the cereal shapes into one of our large ovens where they're toasted for just the right amount of time. Imagine a huge, very hot tumble dryer, except this one doesn't dry your socks - it gives your cereal a lovely golden colour and crisp crunch. When they're done, we let them cool (some of them get a final coating of flavour, like a touch of chocolate coating, mmmm!), then we pack them up and ship them off to the shops. Job done. 

How would you do it at home? 

This is the "pop-your-cakes-into-a-preheated-oven-for-40-minutes" bit. We've just got a bigger oven.

Although warm cereals like oatmeal and grits have the longest history, ready-to-eat cold cereals appeared around the late 19th century and are most often served with dairy products, traditionally cow's milk. They can also be paired with yogurt or plant-based milks, or eaten plain. Fruit or nuts are sometimes added. Many cereals are produced via extrusion.

Some companies promote their products for the health benefits that come from eating oat-based and high-fiber cereals. In the United States, cereals are often fortified with vitamins but can still lack many of the vitamins needed for a healthy breakfast. A significant proportion of cereals have a high sugar content ("sugar cereals" or "sugary cereals" in common parlance). These cereals are frequently marketed toward children and often feature a cartoon mascot and may contain a toy or prize.

Between 1970 and 1998, the number of different types of breakfast cereals in the U.S. more than doubled, from about 160 to around 340; as of 2012, there were roughly 4,945 different types (estimate based on the mass customization of online shopping). In this highly competitive market, cereal companies have developed an ever-increasing number of varieties and flavors (some are flavored like dessert or candy). Although many plain wheat-, oat- and corn-based cereals exist, many other varieties are highly sweetened, while some brands include freeze-dried fruit as a sweet element. The breakfast cereal industry has gross profit margins of 40–45%, Market researchers expect to grow at a CAGR of 7.4% in next 5 years and has had steady and continued growth throughout its history.