Since about 2018, cereal companies have been frequently forging inbound licensing deals or other forms of partnership with marketers of sweet snacks, from candy to cookies to ice cream. The result has been a proliferation of breakfast foods such as Nestlé Drumstick cereal from General Mills, Peeps cereal from Kellogg’s, and Hostess Twinkies cereal from Post, among many more. (See our coverage here and here.)
More recently, in the months leading up to the new normal of COVID-19, cereal brands had, conversely, started to extend their names and flavors, through outbound licensing and promotional deals, into other sweet categories:
- Just this month, General Mills took Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Fruity Lucky Charms to IHOP for buttermilk pancake breakfast stacks featuring layers of cereal and other ingredients including cream cheese icing and vanilla mousse. Pepsico/Quaker Oats’ Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries was part of the effort as well. IHOP is also offering cereal milkshakes incorporating Crunch Berries and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Products are set to be available through April 12 and are still being promoted on the website, even as IHOP, like most other restaurants, has reduced its staff and the breadth of its menu as it has transitioned to delivery and pick-up.
- PepsiCo/Quaker brought Cap’n Crunch into pancakes in another way by pairing with Aunt Jemima (a Quaker sibling brand) for Cap’n Crunch’s Berrytastic Pancake Mix, which contains bits of cereal, as well as Cap’n Crunch’s Ocean Blue Maple Flavored Syrup.
- General Mills paired with Nestlé to take Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Lucky Charms into ice cream. The products started to appear on grocery store shelves nationwide in January.
- In December, General Mills paired with its corporate sibling Pillsbury to bring Lucky Charms ready-to-bake cookie dough to market. The limited-edition sugar cookies feature the cereal’s marshmallow shapes blended into the dough.
This list involves only a handful of brands and just two licensors, and some involve intracorporate partnerships rather than third-party licensing agreements. But it stands to reason that other examples could be on the horizon, depending on what the post-COVID-19 future holds. The pairings make sense as a way to take the cereals out of the bowl and into other eating occasions, with the products often targeted as much to adults as kids and reflecting the way millennial and Gen X consumers tend to eat cereal (e.g., at all times of day, as a snack or even dinner). The agreements also take the concept of successful pairings between two sweet brands, which has been a hot trend in the cereal aisle, to the next level by extending the idea into other areas of the store.
Will these sorts of pairings be attractive as celebratory or comfort foods when the world gets through the COVID-19 crisis and starts to return to some sort of normalcy? Or will the likely economic recession to follow cause consumers to opt for necessities and/or marketers to discontinue non-core products such as these? That remains to be seen. All we know for certain is that sweet-cereal brand extension was on the upswing in the pre-coronavirus world.
Comments are closed.