Cereal and the Internet or Can’t I Eat My Breakfast without Going Online?

The four breakfast cereal boxes sitting on my kitchen counter all have urls to promote healthy eating. Not having noticed that before, I checked if all food packing has urls now, and discovered that many do, but they are primarily, in my small sampling, to enter contests, get recipes, or go to the corporate website. While some of the cereal packages similarly have urls for recipes and the like as well, what I was interested in was the healthy eating information.

Starting with my personal favorite, the Quaker Oats oatmeal package told me that it is one of the “over 250 smart choices made easy from Pepsi Co.” at smartspot.com. There I learned about “energy balance”, why eating breakfast is healthy, and found a link to The Breakfast Research Institute, which is sponsored by Quaker and Tropicana. There, the Breakfast Calculator told me that my breakfast of choice, while higher in calories than a doughnut and cup of coffee, is also significantly more nutritious and brings me closer to meeting my daily recommended nutrition requirements. I could compare my breakfast to their pre-set breakfasts and even tweak mine to increase the nutritional value. And, for my breakfast entertainment, there were podcasts!

After that, I barely wanted to check the other sites out but did out of curiosity. Corn Chex had wholegrainnation.com, where I took a multiple choice quiz about whole grains. Honey Nut Cheerios offered eatbetteramerica.com (which wholegrainnation.com is part of), where I found lots of recipes, a discussion forum, a blog, and more. The blog entries I read all linked to “healthified” recipes in which some ingredients are replaced with alternatives so the result is “as yummy” but “better-for-you”. Finally, Raisin Bran has kelloggsnutrition.com, where “master-moms” taught me how to “snacktivate”.

If I was creating a website that a cereal box led to, based on my perusal of these sites, I would:

• think of common misspellings for my url and buy the domains – typing in kelloggnutrition.com with one “g”, as I first did, should still lead to the right website
• make sure that my discussion forums were not stale (no pun intended) – topics from over a month ago would not be tagged as new
• determine if there is a pedagogical or branding advantage to coining my own terms, such as “healthified” and “snacktivate”
• use the simplicity of cereal – it is generally eaten for breakfast in a bowl with milk – as a guiding principle rather than developing a complex or overwhelming site
• most of all, I would promote healthy eating for breakfast through advice that could be immediately used

The sites I looked at collectively offered advice on all aspects of diet and fitness, not just breakfast, through articles, tests, tools, forums, podcasts, and ask the expert, oriented primarily to parents but with sections for professionals, educators, and children. But what is the likelihood that someone will peruse this abundance of  information and implement significant lifestyle changes before rushing off to school or work?

Ultimately, I preferred the Breakfast Research Institute. It just focused on breakfast. It was the only site that provided me with immediately useful and actionable advice: that adding a piece of fruit to my current breakfast of oatmeal would give me a healthier start to my day. And it confirmed what I already knew, although affirmation is always beneficial: that my current breakfast is far superior nutritionally to coffee and a doughnut.