Monday was a big day for America. Not only did the country celebrate its 240th year of independence but Kellogg’s launched an all-day cereal cafe in New York. It’s called – wait for it – Kellogg’s New York. It’s based in Times Square and a bowl of cereal will set you back $7.50. Yep, that’s right. $7.50. For cereal.
Ah, but you see, it’s not just cereal. Kellog’s has teamed up with a couple of culinary heavyweights – Christina Tosi, founder of Momofuku Milk Bar, and Anthony Rudolf of famed New York Restaurant Per Se – to add a twist to the traditional cereal experience. One of the “milk-based creations” on offer, for example, is Berry Me in Green Tea; a combination of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies, strawberries and green tea powder. You’re basically paying 50 cents for cereal and $7 for a mediocre pun.
Kellogg’s New York isn’t just an attempt at milking free PR from what is essentially an advertisement with a five-year lease. (Although, since the cafe has been covered by everyone from the New York Times to Al Arabiya it has certainly delivered on that front.) Rather it is a reaction to a major sales decline. Over the last decade cereal has lost its hallowed place at the breakfast table as healthier, more convenient, morning food options grow in popularity – particularly among younger generations. According to Mintel, nearly 40% of millennials think cereal is inconvenient for breakfast because it requires too much cleanup. That whole washing a bowl in the morning thing? The struggle is ce-real. (Sorry.)
While millennials might not be breakfasting on cereal with as much gusto as previous generations, they’re not eschewing it altogether. According to Kellogg’s, one-third of cereal consumption happens outside breakfast hours. And cereal hasn’t just become a snack, it has become the ultimate hipster snack; representing a sort of prepackaged, nostalgia-laden ennui. The consummate expression of cereal as counterculture is, of course, the ironic cereal cafe; variations of which have been popping up in rapidly gentrifying areas around the world. The Kellogg’s-branded Times Square cafe marks the inevitable corporate appropriation, and thus probable culmination, of this trend.
Kellogg’s New York is also just the latest evolution of cereal’s shifting role in western culture. When cereal was first created, towards the end of the 19th century, it was promoted as part of a temperate Christian lifestyle. A bland diet was thought to keep both body and mind healthy, subduing sinful sexual urges. Dr John Harvey Kellogg who, alongside his brother Will, invented Corn Flakes, extolled cereal as a means to curb masturbation – about which he had very severe views.
But market forces soon tempered cereal’s puritanical bent. Cereal was a high-margin business with low barriers to entry. The Kelloggs brothers quickly found themselves in a crowded market, surrounded by competitors. Because the cereal category was so easily commoditized, advertising became essential. Over the next few decades, cereal manufacturers pioneered innovative marketing techniques through which they could insinuate their product into popular culture and the family breakfast table. In 1971, for example, Post Cereals introduced two bestselling cereals Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles Cereal, that were based on the Flintstones TV cartoon. These were among the first brands created entirely around a media property.
The 70s, 80s and 90s were the golden area of pop culture cereal tie-ins. There was Pac-Man cereal, Ghostbusters cereal, Cabbage Patch Kids cereal. Pretty much every TV show, game or movie had a cereal that went along with it or a toy that you could find at the bottom of the packet. When you understand the extent to which cereal threaded its marketing tentacles throughout popular culture, the nostalgic hold that it exerts within a certain privileged counterculture starts to make more sense. Cereal isn’t just something Gen Xers and older millennials ate as kids, it was ingrained in the whole experience of childhood; inextricably connected with Saturday-morning cartoons and family fun.
As kids of the 70s and 80s became adults, cereal became a sort of Peter Pan food for those who didn’t really want to grow up. Snacking on cereal became synonymous with a rejection of a certain sort of corporate, adult values. It was populist protest in its most facile form. A guy with long hair eating cereal for dinner became shorthand for “slacker” in many a 90s movie.
The 90s slacker, of course, was the forebear of the 2000s hipster. They were characterized by the same cynicism and rejection of ostentatious materialism. But while slackers were marked by a studied apathy, hipsters were driven by a serious case of early-onset nostalgia combined with a neurotic need for individual self-expression. Like riding a fixie or drinking out of a mason jar, eating cereal as a snack became self-conscious, considered performance. You can see this play out in the 2007 cereal-core classic Flakes (now playing on Netflix), in which a struggling musician manages a cereal cafe and spends his days debating the ideal milk-to-flake ratio with his regulars.
I haven’t actually seen Flakes myself – I think only about five people in the world have. Two of those five are Alan and Gary Keery, a pair of bearded Irish identical twins. The film apparently inspired their decision to start London’s famous Cereal Killer Cafe in 2014. That a failed film starring Zooey Deschanel inspired an ironic business is maybe one of the most hipster things to ever have happened.
The Cereal Killer Cafe opened in the Shoreditch neighborhood of London, where there were already tensions simmering about the effects of rapid gentrification on a historically poor area, in September 2015. The exorbitantly priced bowls of cereal (around $4.50 a bowl) were controversial, particularly after one of the brothers told a journalist he thought the prices were “cheap for the area”.
Indeed the Cereal Killer Cafe has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with hipster-led gentrification and was targeted in anti-capitalist riots last year. Nevertheless, the cereal cafe concept continued to grow in popularity, with version popping up around the world – from Paris to Australia. Last year New York got its first cereal bar when streetwear brand KITH opened up KITH Treats in its flagship store in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.
While cereal cafes may have become a catalyst for gentrification the irony is that, with the advent of the Kellogg’s cafe, they have now themselves been entirely gentrified. This of course is a familiar cycle and the inevitable progress of all trends: a reaction to mainstream consumer culture becomes a counterculture which is gradually appropriated by corporations to become mainstream consumer culture. Indeed, I’m willing to bet that, in a corporate boardroom somewhere, a Wonder Bread executive is drawing up plans for New York’s first Artisanal Jam Toast Cafe. And if they’re not, well, you can berry me in green tea.
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