Excerpted from the NY Times When a Sugar High Isn’t Enough
Dr. John Kellogg — founder of the world’s largest cereal company had a simple credo: “Eat what the monkey eats … simple food and not too much of it.”
Do monkeys eat Pringles?
Hope so because Kellogg is buying Pringles from Procter & Gamble in a $2.7 billion deal expected to close this summer.
Why?
For openers, Kellogg’s legacy brands (Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies) are under pressure from private labels and other breakfast convenience foods.
Note: Kellogg cranks out about 200 million pounds of private-label cereal a year.
The real growth for Kellogg, as well as for packaged-food rivals like PepsiCo and its Frito-Lay division, is foreign markets and snacks. That’s where Pringles comes in.
Kellogg’s CEO says that selling cereal and selling snacks are two entirely different skills.
What the company is buying with Pringles is not just a line of products that is already huge internationally, but a group of Procter & Gamble merchandisers with “the snack mind-set.”
“When you’re talking about snacks … it’s about someone who came into the store to buy something else and hit a display and thinks, ‘Hey, I’d love to have a can of Pringles.’
With snacks, it’s much more intercepting the consumer in-store as opposed to getting on their shopping list.
It’s in-store merchandising.
It’s retail entertainment.
Whereas cereal is much more about the 30-second feel-good ad.”
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Nutrition note: According to Robert H. Lustig, a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco:
”People who consume sugar are more likely to overeat because “there are signals to the brain that tell you when you’ve had enough; sugar blocks them.
Eating calories from sugar will therefore lead you to consume more calories.”
Thanks to DM for feeding the lead
The Homa Files 