Kellogg Opens New Cereal Café in Manhattan

The food maker is hoping that millennials will help revive soggy cereal sales.

December 15, 2017

NEW YORK CITY – Kellogg Co. is banking that millennials, with their Instagram obsession, will push cereal into the “cool” realm again, Bloomberg reports. To that end, the food maker has opened a new cereal café in Union Square in Manhattan. Kellogg opened its first cereal café in Times Square in 2016.

The Union Square location is much larger than the Times Square one, and has an Instagram area complete with professional lighting and props to make posting to social media easy and fun for customers. A full cereal bar, a Pop-Tart heating station, an iron to make fresh Eggo waffles, and murals of Kellogg characters round out the café. “We want cereal to be seen as modern,” said Aleta Chase, a marketing executive.

Cereal sales have been soggy for several years, and is predicted to fall 1.6% this year, according to Euromonitor International. Kellogg has registered its own declining cereal sales, with Special K sales plummeting 26% over the past five years.

The company has posited that cereal decreases aren’t in free-fall anymore as younger consumers are turning to cereal as a snack option, but it hasn’t generated across-the-board increases, so Kellogg has upped its presence in the Big Apple with a second cereal café. “We needed something that was more experiential,” Chase said. “There’s a more lasting emotional connection if they experience it firsthand—that’s hard to do with a TV commercial.”

Two veterans of fine-dining establishment, Sandra Di Capua and Anthony Rudolf, run the café. While the company views the eatery primarily as marketing, Di Capua and Rudolf want to make it as successful as the Times Square location. “It has to be a viable business,” Rudolf said.

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