Sam Amico
When you have milk powder, who needs the real stuff?
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That’s sort of the way Kellogg’s is promoting its new “instabowls” line. You can add milk, but it sounds like water may be better. Or you can just eat it dry.
But adding water and a quick stir gives you the same results as if you had added regular milk, Kellogg’s says. The idea of all this is to save time and take the cereal with you wherever you go.
The new instabowls mark the “first time that we’re able to give consumers the opportunity to have a milk and cereal experience without having milk readily available,” said Chris Stolsky, marketing director at Kellogg, via CNN. “This can go with you wherever.”
The bowls are available for the low, low price of $1.98. There are four popular kinds currently available — Frosted Flakes, Raisin Bran Crunch, Fruit Loops and Apple Jacks. As of now, they are only available at select Walmart locations.
Kellogg’s New Insta-Bowls
At any rate, Kellogg’s is now calling itself a “plant-based” company, given the sugars and crabs in its products. Gotta find a healthy angle somehow, right?
Of course, these sorts of small cereal packages are nothing new. Kellogg’s already has made them available. But these are the first where you don’t need to add milk to enjoy them fully.
Again, just water will do.
As CNN reported, cereal sales rose considerably during the pandemic. Before that, they were on the decline. Now, it seems, they are somewhere in between.
“In 2020, US ready-to-eat cereal sales surged to over $9 billion, up 9% from 2019, according to data from NielsenIQ,” CNN reported. “The bump was short-lived, however. In 2021, sales fell 7% to $8.4 billion — still above 2019 sales, but below the pandemic surge.”
Perhaps the instabowls will help those numbers. It probably won’t hurt that you can just add the water and — viola — you have a bowl of cereal. No shaking or stirring is required.
Stolsky called it “a proprietary process that essentially evaporates the water off but leaves the milk components there.
“So when you add the water back, it’s the same great taste, same great nutrition that you get with a regular amount of milk.”
He added that the plan is for instabowls to be available at more stores than just Walmart. But Kellogg’s wants to see how the bowls fare before rolling them out to hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of locations.
“The magic is in the bowl,” Stolsky said.
