The New York City public school system has stopped serving a Kellogg’s brand cereal to students, replacing it with a healthier, organic brand of cereal made by a small California company.
Last year the Kellogg Company discontinued several flavors of its Kashi brand cereal, a product advertised as a healthier cereal choice. But instead of simply picking some of Kellogg’s other brands to replace Kashi, school officials decided to hold taste testing for other, newer brands. Ultimately the district chose the Back to the Roots brand, The New York Times reported.
The new brand features lower levels of sugar and salt, as well as fewer calories than any of the Kellogg’s cereals, the paper reports. The small company’s offering is also free of preservatives and does not artificially add vitamins. In addition, its cereals are certified as organic.
“Breakfast is really important to us, and we’re trying to get our menu to where we want it to be,” said Eric Goldstein, the chief executive of the Office of School Support Services, told the paper. “In the world we live in, though, there are so many constraints, so being able to offer Back to the Roots cereals for us is like a breath of fresh air.”
Up to 254,000 children a day eats breakfast at New York City schools, according to district officials.
The move to replace several of the Kellogg’s brands with the healthier choice comes on the heels of pressure from Congress, the state and some parents for schools to make better choices for school food programs.
New York school officials also said that during the taste testing, kids chose the Back to the Roots brand over others.
The district is still offering brands by the big cereal companies — General Mills, Post Foods, and even Kellogg’s, among them — but school administrators feel the new brands are offering a healthier choice.
The big change in New York only adds to the woes of the Kellogg company, whose stock has been falling along with its market share. Only a month ago the company announced it was slashing its sales force, laying off over 1,000 workers, and shuttering 39 distribution centers.
The February announcement came on top of major cuts already announced this year. Early in January Kellogg Co. announced it was firing 250 workers.
The multiple rounds of cutbacks occurred after Kellogg’s decided to cut its advertising with Breitbart News at the end of 2016, thereby snubbing Breitbart’s 45 million readers.
In November, Kellogg’s noted that Breitbart News’s conservative readers are not “aligned with our values as a company.”
While the decision by Kellogg’s to cease advertising made virtually no revenue impact on Breitbart.com, it did represent an escalation in the war by leftist companies like Target and Allstate against conservative customers whose values propelled Donald Trump into the White House.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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