In the land of cereal, Minnesota’s breakfast upstarts offer substitute for Lucky Charms, Froot Loops

Hannah Barnstable remembers browsing through the cereal aisle at her local grocery store as a child, feasting her eyes upon colorful boxes of breakfast staples like Cocoa Puffs, Trix and Cap’n Crunch.

Decades later, when she was readying to open her own cereal company, she had a moment of déjà vu.

“When we got started, I had this epiphany: How could the cereal aisle look exactly the same as it did when I was a kid?” said the founder and CEO of Seven Sundays.

Cereal brands like hers would end up irrevocably altering the industry, which has seen sugary standards fade while expensive-but-healthy options have surged.

One local breakfast industry player calls it a “renaissance.”

Parker Brook, the founder of Edina-based Lovebird Foods, left General Mills after the birth of his daughter to make organic cereal without grains or refined sugars.

Never mind inflation, shoppers are shelling out up to $10 for a box that lists all the ingredients right on the front. Since 2019, Lovebird sales have doubled every year.

“People are willing to pay more for quality,” Brook said. “Especially in a category like cereal that historically has been dominated by the few.”

The four largest players in cereal — Golden Valley-based General Mills; Kellogg; Lakeville-based Post Consumer Brands; and Quaker Oats — still control 80% of the $11 billion retail cereal market. But they all continued to sell less cereal over the past year, according to retail sales data from Circana.

The fastest-growing brands are often the most expensive, meanwhile, and tend toward “clean labels” with lower sugar, higher protein and no additives.

“You’re paying more for ingredients,” Brook said. “So I think it’s less sticker shock for people. It’s more like, ‘Hey, I know what I’m getting. I’m getting what I pay for,’ vs. paying for some advertising budget for Nickelodeon or for these other cereal companies.”

Cereal has long been slipping as younger generations turn on the century-old breakfast staple. After a brief resurgence during pandemic lockdowns, the industry’s big players are back to managed decline.

Then comes the health-and-wellness trend reshaping food and beverages, which has folks opening their wallets for less-processed options.

Brook said the cereal aisle is one of the last parts of the grocery store to really feel that shift.

“It’s a massive category,” he said, “and I think it’s due for some new entrants.”

Seven Sundays started selling muesli at farmers markets more than a decade ago. Now the Minneapolis-based company is in 7,000 stores around the country.

Recently hitting shelves at Target and Costco, the brand has found quick growth alongside other increasingly mainstream natural cereal brands like Magic Spoon, Catalina Crunch and Three Wishes.

“We’ve heard from people, ‘Thank you, I haven’t had cereal in a year,’” Barnstable said. “There was a lack of incremental ideas that are truly going to bring new sales down that aisle.”

Like Lovebird, Seven Sundays has seen sales more than double year over year since the pandemic.

“This is why we quit our jobs to start Seven Sundays,” Barnstable said about the accelerating trend toward “better-for-you” options. “Real food actually tastes better.”

The overall decline of cereal is not about price increases in recent years, she contends.

“It doesn’t matter what the price of Cheerios is anymore; it’s just not something some consumers are as willing to purchase because of all the stuff we all know about heavily processed, genetically modified ingredients, artificial dyes and sugar,” she said.

On average, leading cereal brands are leaning into taste rather than health. A study of cereal trends published in JAMA Open Network Wednesday showed “concerning nutritional shifts: notable increases in fat, sodium and sugar alongside decreases in protein and fiber” since 2010.

That prevailing trend in mainstream cereal is running counter to political pressure from the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, which is casting ultra-processed foods in a negative light.

On Thursday, the federal MAHA Commission issued a scathing report blaming the nation’s food supply, and other issues, for chronic disease.

With that kind of messaging targeting foods like cereal, “no lower price is going to drive somebody to go back,” Barnstable said. “It has to be something completely new.”

Food industry veteran John Haugen sees several factors altering the landscape: the changing food preferences of millennials and Gen Z, advancements in food science and the national conversation around ultra-processed foods.

“Regardless of what the policy changes are that actually happen,” he said, “it’s creating discussion and visibility where consumers are taking a minute to say, ‘Hey, what is in my food?’”

Haugen is the managing partner of SEMCAP Food + Nutrition, a growth-stage private equity firm, as well as the founder and former longtime leader of 301 Inc. at General Mills. He led investment into granola brand Purely Elizabeth at SEMCAP and while at 301 Inc.

Among ready-to-eat cereal brands Circana tracks, which includes granola, Purely Elizabeth had the biggest growth through the past year: a 65% jump in sales. The 16-year-old Colorado company now leads the granola category.

“Consumers are connecting with the authenticity of these small brands,” Haugen said. “Legacy food brands in general were built before the digital age, versus the up-and-coming food brands of today built with a more direct relationship with the consumer.”

That’s not to say the big players are missing out entirely: Cascadian Farm is a recognizable organic brand with the heft of a multinational corporation behind it.

The General Mills-owned organic label saw retail cereal sales jump 13% in the past year, while Big G cereals including Cheerios and Trix fell 4%.

“Cascadian Farm has seen strong growth across both granola and non-granola cereal varieties,” the company said. “General Mills is also seeing brands that deliver protein perform well, including our recently launched Cheerios Protein and Ghost Protein Cereal varieties.”

Even with the overall decline, sugary cereals aren’t going away; they’re still very profitable, just a little less so each year. And Post Consumer Brands is the leading producer of private-label (store-brand) cereals, which saw a 2% rise in the past year and have nearly doubled market share in the past five years.

Post Holdings Chief Operating Officer Jeff Zadoks recently told analysts the company expects to keep making money as the category slowly shrinks.

“The objective is to do our best to manage our cost to maintain the profitability,” he said. “So if we can get the category to more of that historic decline, we think that those actions would enable us to maintain our margins.”

Yet while many analysts opine on operational efficiencies and promotional investments needed to keep the category afloat, Barnstable sees a fundamental shift in cereal and in food in general.

“Consumers are reading ingredients. They’re learning from social media, for better or worse, some of the issues going on in food,” she said. “But you always have to lead with taste. You can’t just go correct a problem and not focus on taste.”