Is This the Beginning of End for Breakfast Cereal

Is This the Beginning of the End for Breakfast Cereals?

Opinion | 20 Jun 2014

Pinar HosafciAnalyst

- Food

Convenience breakfast is the new big thing.

Following Mondelez’s debut through its Belvita

breakfast biscuits in 2010, the breakfast

market is now brimming with products ranging

from yoghurt pots to breakfast drinks, and

this does not bode well for the breakfast cereals category. Per capita consumption of

breakfast cereals is plateauing globally and is declining in most of the largest markets

in North America and Western Europe. So, could this recent interest in more

convenient breakfast options spell the end for the category as we know it?

Breakfast Cereals: Historical Consumption in its Largest Five Markets

Source: Euromonitor International

Convenience breakfast on the rise in the West

Convenience breakfast is proving to be a very fertile market. Initially starting with

breakfast biscuits, convenience options now include breakfast pots, yoghurt pouches

and breakfast drinks, and these products are also resonating well with consumers. In

the UK, sales of Belvita biscuits have grown more than tenfold in the four years since

the product’s launch, Danone’s Activia breakfast pots are driving the spoonable

yoghurt category in France and the UK and breakfast drinks are seeing high doubledigit growth in Australia. Cereal producers are not immune to this and have started to

fight back. In 2013, Quaker, Kellogg and Weetabix all launched their own convenience

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breakfast offerings. Kellogg has even gone one step further and partnered up with the

dairy player Danone to combine two on-trend breakfast options in its YoCrunch Cereal

Bowl, which includes a serving of Greek yoghurt with an RTE cereal topper. Cereal

brands are also transferring the convenience hype to their traditional area of

expertise. The breakfast cereals category is increasingly shifting to smaller pack

formats. The share of thin wall plastic containers, the typical pack type for...