Category Captain: Breakfast Foods– Cereal, Including Convenient Wholesome Foods: General Mills

General Mills defines three key components to its success: defining the aisle, displaying the aisle and developing the anchors.

General Mills’ “Grow with Grain” research shows that executing the right strategies and tactics for the cereal aisle can deliver greater shopper loyalty to the total food basket. Further, the company strives to maximize growth of the aisle’s most important categories: grain bars, which generate 7.5 percent higher sales rates when in the aisle, and hot cereal, which when positioned with the aisle’s historic anchor, RTE cereal, enjoys 4.9 percent higher sales rates.

General Mills has used its “Space Station” tool to help retailers reshape their cereal aisles for better configurations that maximize space for high-performing products and improve overall store shopability.

For RTE cereal, General Mills has delivered insights on consumer needs, shopper purchase trends and best practice category strategies through proprietary research efforts designed to target growth opportunities at the shelf and on promotion. Further, the company’s “Accelerate the Category” helps retailers find additional space in the cereal aisle to expand CWF and meet the future space needs of the category today. Such initiatives have been successful in changing aisle space at several key retailers, and will continue to make the cereal aisle pivotal to overall food sales success.

General Mills leads in the cereal aisle with the largest cereal franchise, Cheerios, and has driven innovation over the past several decades with the invention of both the granola bar category with Nature Valley in 1975, followed by the fruit snack category in the 1980s. General Mills introduced fiber bars to the market, with the 2007 launch of Fiber One Bars, which redefined the health and taste of the grain bar category, and continues to drive segment success.