When in America the number of working hours began to increase at the same time than the fast-food development, Kellogg's saw an opportunity on the breakfast market. The idea was that american people had less and less time on the morning to eat, especially when they live far from their work. To gain some of this precious time that is the morning time, Kellogg's began to offer a little box of cereals with some conditioned milk and a plastic spoon: the Cereal Mates. This box was declined with four kinds of the most popular kellogg's cereals : Corn Flakes, Frosties, Fruit Loops and Mini Wheats. It believed so much in this new product that it launched a TV advertising campaign:
But this product never worked and the following year in 1999, when Kellogg's rival General Mills became the market leader, it was abandonned.
The fact is, Kellogg's did not understand the need of its customers and did several mistakes in its product elaboration.
Its first and main mistake was the milk conditioning. As the product was stored on the breakfast shelves the milk was warm, and when Kellogg's decided to store it on the refrigerated shelves nobody thought of buying their breakfast cereals in there. In addition to that, advertisings show children using the product by themselves, while in reality the packaging was not practical enough to enable them to serve the milk properly. To finish, the taste of a conditoned-in-a-sanitized-way milk was not very good.
The second main mistake was the price. Sold at more than a dollar, the product's price was considered way too expensive compared to its quality and its promises it couldn't keep: indeed, the Kellogg's Cereal Mates were supposed to be a practical product above all. But serving the milk and using a spoon was no practical way to quickly eat breakfast for a huge majority of consumers.
A few years ago Kellogg's tried again to create a practical breakfast product, and launched the Nutri-Grain range, some cereal bars which need neither milk nor spoon. And it is now one of the Kellogg's biggest successes, as Nutri-Grain became the second most liked breakfast biscuit market brand within nine months.
The moral of this story: Forewarned is forearmed !
