"Let them eat cereal" How "greedflation" fueled consumer ire against Kellogg | Hacker News Reader

"Let them eat cereal" How "greedflation" fueled consumer ire against Kellogg

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75 pointsDocFeind92 comments

It's a stupid suggestion anyway. Most breakfast cereals are basically pure carbs, with nothing in the way of protein and very little fiber. You can get some protein in the milk, but that's not the cereal itself anyway, and also has a surprising amount of sugar. Two meals a day of breakfast cereal is not a nutritious diet.

Once in a while as a treat, sure, given that they're basically crappy candies anyway, but you shouldn't be living on mostly breakfast cereals. The affordability argument dissolves when you're trying to actually get a reasonable nutritious balance from them, given that the average bowl of cereal gives you about a tenth your needed daily calories.

Depends on the cereal. kellogs is just junk food of course, but you can buy oats, crushed wheat etc in a raw form.

Those are better, but still don't give a ton of calories or protein all said. You have to eat a lot of oats to live off them.

You're not wrong, but this was my normal breakfast (and I skipped lunch) at university 20 years ago:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=rolled+oats+200g+%2B+50...

(Plus a bit of dried fruit, but I'm not sure how much, this far removed).

That's just two full bowls. Dinner was usually just one pack of instant noodles from Lidl.

At the time, this cost me about £0.50/day.

Unless you're stretching the definition of 'a bit of dried fruit' I call bullshit. There's no way you can live more than a month or two on cereal and instant noodles.

5-6 out of every 7 meals, which I think is legit "most", which was the adjective I used. The others were generally cheese on toast. I can't remember how much dried fruit I added, but I think it couldn't have been more than 50g/day given the price of a pack of sultanas becomes significant fraction of the total spend above that.

I made a game out of how little I could spend without feeling hungry, so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone for longer than a university term.

> "most", which was the adjective I used

The peril of editing without checking afterwards. Synonymous with the adjective I used? something like that.

for some time during high school my breakfast was oats, freshly ground grains, a bit of oil and other ingredients that were available like nuts or raisins or other dried fruits, occasionally maybe also fresh fruits. i don't remember if i added water or milk, probably either, depending on what was there.

the key was that this meal lasted me for 24 hours. so practically only one meal a day.

i don't know how long i did that, or how frequent. i doubt i would have done that everyday for more than a few weeks. more like weekdays with some other meals in between once in a while. but i really have no memory of that aspect of it.

There are cereals with lots of fiber that help save off constipation.

I cook legumes in bulk and freeze them in individual portions. My usual breakfast is oatmeal and water in a pasta bowl, with the frozen food on top, all microwaved together. It all defrosts and rehydrates (rolled oats are sold already cooked) at the same time so it's very convenient.

This has more protein than pure oats, but you're right the calorie density is a problem. A bowl of oats cooked as porridge has about half to 2/3rd the calories of a bowl of cooked pasta, depending on how thick you make it. I usually add some butter or olive oil to improve this.

Oats Sarge?

The Horse, The Phil Silvers Show S1E4

For years, I’ve been adding fruit to my porridge for extra carbs and a little sweetness. I also add bran or wheat germ for improved flavour, texture and roughage.

Than, last year, a work colleague turned me on to the idea of stirring in peanut butter. It works surprisingly well and tastes good (particularly with banana). I never found porridge particularly filling until I started doing this.

> It's a stupid suggestion anyway. Most breakfast cereals are basically pure carbs, with nothing in the way of protein and very little fiber. You can get some protein in the milk, but that's not the cereal itself anyway, and also has a surprising amount of sugar. Two meals a day of breakfast cereal is not a nutritious diet.

Ironically, the most infuriating thing about Kellogg's is that they can get away with labelling one of their cereals (Vector) with a high protein value that comes largely from the milk you're expected to add to it. Prominently on the face of the box: 13g protein. Actual cereal content: 5.7g

https://www.wkkellogg.ca/en-ca/products/vector-meal-replacem...

They can get away with it because it's officially designated a "meal replacement" - so they're technically not breaking rules.

But the stuff is still stocked in the cereal aisle. And anyone would call it a cereal as the term is commonly used.

The Guardian had a better headline: "Let them eat Flakes" (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/27/kelloggs-ceo...)

Cadbury's version would be "Let them eat Flake"

Isn’t the headline based on the name of the collective action? I’d blame the lack of cleverness on whoever coined the TikTok trend.

All the processed cereal aisle is so bad for your health. The problem isn't that Kelloggs raised its prices, the problem is that such big corporations sell junk food at such a low price in the first place.

> There are reports that the calls for the boycott of the brand are already starting to have some effect... some shoppers have already started to see Kellogg’s cereals for prices as low as 99 cents on supermarket shelves.

I'm confident that's isolated to a few stores with a nice discount going on rather than an across the board change coming down from Kellogg. They aren't going to knock the price down to less than a third of what it cost last week because of a boycott, they'd set the price to whatever it was right before people started complaining.

If they moved it from $3.27 to $.99 because of pressure, they wouldn't be able to raise the price back to what it was again for years. And this boycott isn't nearly big enough for them to be doing something like that. I think that's what you'd do if a mob was actively straining against the locked doors of your corporate headquarters, rather than another angry group complaining on the internet.

Not that Kellogg aren't bastards, I'm just saying let's be real about the effectiveness of internet boycotts.

It's also very possible that 99 cents is substantially below cost and the supermarket just wants a loss leader and/or to clear inventory.

I suspect all the “greedy companies jacking up prices” stories lately are in service of this year’s election cycle.

Trillions extra in government spending without a corresponding increase in production created high inflation. Now, like a frosting-smeared toddler standing next to an empty cake pan, they’re pointing the finger at the family dog. Greedy corporations, pay their fair share, we’ve seen this tired trope before.

We can test this hypothesis by looking at the profits of publicly traded companies.

IIRC profit margins of grocery stores are around 4%.

The grocery stores generally aren't the ones increasing prices.

The opposite could be true like in Canada where a Loblaws lobbyist is the campaign manager for the Conservative party and Loblaws keeps jacking up prices on everything.

It’s safe to assume that companies are always greedy, it’s in their nature. That’s why we need competition between companies. The alternative is regulation but companies tend to love regulation as regulatory capture is easier than real competition.

I think systems that presuppose non-greedy companies are just as fanciful as those that presuppose non corrupt governments.

This doesn’t make any sense – the government spent money in no small part due to enormous demand from businesses for assistance, company profit margins are public data, and your vague “they” is conflating the government, academics, and journalists as a single group coordinating for political reasons despite obvious differences between and within those groups. Study after study has found that profit taking is a considerable cost driver:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/greedflation-caused-more-half...

What specifically doesn’t make sense? A bigger pool of money chasing the same amount of resources equals higher prices (and profits).

The simplistic framing and acting like this is some poor companies being beat up by a poorly defined conspiracy of everyone else trying to skew an election. Reality is just so much more complicated, and I’d start with the thought that perhaps this is getting attention now because a lot of people are feeling financial pressure and that is triggering interest from many different parties.

There’s a lot more that goes into velocity of money/demand for money than those 2 singular factors.

One thing is clear: whoever wrote the headline in your link cherry-picked a time period that overstates the effect of "greedflation".

> Corporate profits drove 53% of inflation during the second and third quarters of 2023 and more than one-third since the start of the pandemic

IOW, even according to that report, roughly two-thirds of recent inflation was not due to greedflation.

Note the “last year” in the headline.

This is not the first time they have shrunk their product.

They did the same thing after the 2008 banking crisis.

I would say let them do it if they want, it is their business to make those decisions.

But I would like to have an independent group that looks into all the additives in processed foods. Far too many things allowed in food in the US is banned in Europe.

Up 17.1% in a single, cherry-picked year. How does this stack up against inflation more broadly? It's a terrible trope in financial reporting to write a whole article about one data point, out of context.

Respectfully disagree. Inflation is cumulative in its effects. Up 17.1% in a single year outweighs 2% annual inflation over many years in its impact on the consumer. It is much more revealing than an average figure which can bury the total impact.

Inflation over the last, say, 5 years, has definitively not averaged 2% pa. Especially in basic supplies like food and fuel. Consumer goods often have "sticky" prices, for various reasons. Example:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_price_of_Coca-Cola_fro...

It’s not out of context. They point out how Kellogg’s is the highest of their competitors. And Kellogg’s was the one suggesting to use cereal to combat food inflation.

It would have been nice to have more comparison and reference to how overall CPI was 3% for the same year, but it’s not the worst article.

Compound Inflation, the less talked about sibling of Compound Interest.

A few percent doesn't sound much, until you think about how those percentages accumulate over several/many years.

A simple solution is to stop eating cereal, especially Kellogg's.

I think we've forgotten that we have a choice and can buy someone else's product or service.

I don’t understand why you are downvoted. If anything, the price of boxed garbage nutrition cereal going up and up will result in much better societal outcomes for the US.

I wish there had been a price tracker for walmart like there is for amazon (camelcamelcamel)

Because all the food as essentially doubled in price over the past three years, some only 150% but still, that's crazy.

It was a slow creep. And it feels like it was engineered by AI, not market demand.

generic, plain Corn Flakes used to be $1 for a 18 ounce box, they are now $2.25

and corn is one of the most heavily government subsidized industries in the USA

greedflation is real. It’s real because of competition drying up. Lina Khan is either incompetent or corrupt or both.

The more consolidation we have at the top, the more power they have to raise their prices without consequences.

When everything is an unregulated monopoly, those companies can set prices however they want.

Regulated monopolies are generally quite successful in lobbying their regulators to end up with regulatory capture. Then you end up with the worst of both worlds with no possibility of a competitor to displace them.

Not always, but yes sometimes. Not sure what the solution is, but I don't think it should be legal for a former regulator to get employed for a company they're regulating. It sets the standard to go easy and a cushy desk job will be waiting for you where you get paid a lot to do nothing. Properly done, regulators push back on cost increases unless we'll justified. A lot of utilities lose rate cases.

You're talking about the revolving door, that's easy to fix compared to the real problems. Politics is connected to people with money and those same people have investments in the companies being regulated. The regulators will be instructed by politicians to go-easy, and they will because why not, it's other people's money being wasted. The companies will hold their services hostage to the point that a politician/regulator must have the fortitude to be willing to let the regulated company fail, let the services fail, see large numbers of people laid off, have people's pensions take a hit, and endure constant attacks by news media. Or they can put up a noisy but ineffectual fight which they give in at the last minute and then be able to tell people that at least they tried.

The Kelloggs products are rubbish, not nutrition.

They can make the package smaller and smaller and then take it off the shelves completely.

Usually raw food is cheaper per calorie and macronutrients than any processed food. To me it seems that a box of kellogs costs like almost twice per gram of legumes. And they have the benefit of actually being tasty if properly prepared.

Used to be that way. I feel like a carton of eggs is exorbitant these days.

That’s the corporate profit-taking at work. If you buy from farmers or Costco prices have been stable.

Marketing has jumped the shark. This is very stupid -sure college kids eat cereal for their three meals because they’re in a bind (time, money, etc) but they have their health, for the most part.

So this is silly.

But so is the president when he complains about shrinkfkation using his exaggerated Jim Carey face from the grinch.

The complicated policy led to this. Companies either raise prices or sell you less for the same price. This is transparent posturing.

> Companies either raise prices or sell you less for the same price.

Or they sell you the same amount for the same price. Much of these increases are not 'required' they cash grabs. F these guys.

But isn’t the purpose of a business to be a cash grab? If consumers are willing to pay more, charge more.

I don’t care if Kelloggs raises prices. It will make them more money up until the point people switch over to Post or the store brand (that’s 99% identical), and then they adjust prices.

The problem is if there’s collusion and all manufacturers raise prices so they can’t compete on price.

The problem is collusion. Not “the heads of the two companies call each other and cackle while they bathe in pools of money” collusion, but soft collusion where their pricing models aim for profit over sales numbers.

So you’re saying that it’s a problem when multiple companies are trying to make a profit?

I know that profit is a foreign concept to most VC backed tech companies, but it’s pretty fundamental to everybody else

That’s not collusion that’s just optimizing price for profit. You can have ‘collusion in effect’ with price matching on a market leader where multiple companies can price as if they were a single company monopoly without explicit coordination.

There are many situations that are not considered true monopolies that I think should be, such a geographical monopolies that occur when there is a tacit agreement for companies not to enter each other’s areas of operations.

That is just the "free market" we operate in... There is little to do about that unless we want government to cap prices on everything, including wages.

In the end solution is to break up these large conglomerates and stop them ever going over certain size by acquisitions. And exactly same should be done in tech. Big companies should not be allowed to buy start-ups for example.

I agree that greedflation is very much a thing. When many competitors do this, it makes it easier for others to do the same.

However, I find it frustrating that so many articles, economists and the government consistently fail to mention the primary proximate cause for inflation.

Namely, the simple fact that 80% of all the dollars ever created were created in the most recent 4 years.

In my opinion inflation is a misnomer. It would be more accurate to call it dilution of the purchasing power of the dollar aka grand theft by central bankers.

We’ve had higher inflation over the last few years that’s affected prices and salaries. That’s not in question at all. That money printer has hardly cooled down.

Do you want to provide the same labor at the same price so your company doesn’t have to raise prices?

> Do you want to provide the same labor at the same price so your company doesn’t have to raise prices?

In many cases, the company keeps salaries the same AND raises prices. Then they complain that 'no one wants to work any more'.

This used to be true, but a lot of pricing is automated now, based on location, pricing of similar products, etc etc. it’s also still somewhat in its infancy.

Remember way back when high frequency trading was first a thing, you’d hear stories about some HFT houses cranking up the prices of some little penny stock on the basis their algorithms saw the price go up and then jumped in, causing some kind of feedback loop?

I think that’s exactly what’s going on now, only at a pace more in line with merchandise pricing (over weeks rather than milliseconds).

I think it goes beyond not eating cereal and doing our best to avoid eating highly processed foods in general. I think it’s as simple as reading the label, and if you don’t understand the label, you shouldn’t be eating it.

Box foods, most canned foods, dare I say, most of the foods in a grocery store are highly processed, chemically engineered, with little nutrition value. I’m not a food scientist, but I think we can do better making our own meals, than depending on highly processed boxed/packaged foods from the grocery store.

> canned foods

I would love to understand how food placed into a can and boiled to pasteurize it is highly processed

You’re thinking of canned fruit and vegetables used to preserve them and not products like SPAM and Vienna sausages which are highly processed mystery meats. There are lots of highly processed canned foods you probably don’t even notice unless you know what you’re looking for.

I don't think of that as covering "most canned foods", though. Most canned foods are pretty ordinary canned foods, and aren't highly processed.

I think that depends entirely on your region, diet, culture, etc. here in California the distribution varries a lot between higher end stores like Trader Joes, lower end ones like Aldi or Grocery Outlet and culture specific ones like Ranch 99.

Ok, I see the lack of knowledge here

What is Spam?

https://www.livescience.com/32813-hormel-spam-no-mystery-mea... Ingredients: Pork with ham meat added, salt, water, potato starch, sugar and sodium nitrite. The pork is shoulder meat.

What is in that list that is highly objectionable? Its mixed together, canned and boiled so that its preserved and ready to eat out of the can cold.

Same with Vienna Sausage: MECHANICALLY SEPARATED CHICKEN, WATER, SALT, CORN SYRUP. CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF: BEEF, PORK, DEXTROSE, NATURAL FLAVORS, SODIUM NITRITE, GARLIC POWDER. BROTH: CHICKEN BROTH.

I dont like the sugar in there but whatever. What is in there that is objectionable?

I'm not saying that these aren't calorie dense and high in salt, but that was the POINT.

What do you think “processed food” is?

Diversion but OK. Processed is anything that requires prep work outside of eating it off a tree or killing a animal and eating it raw.

So I answered your question. Can you answer mine?

What do you think “highly processed” is?

I find the process used to make spam objectionable. You know, as in processed foods? And ham, which is itself a processed ingredient.

It’s fully cured and cooked pork. I don’t understand how that’s not highly processed. The only level below that is ultraprocessed foods like cheetohs and dorritos.

Ham is a processed pork product that is cured using salt or smoking.

I find it strange that you say people should prepare home meals, but are against historically common ways of having food TO eat.

Kimchi, Sauerkraut, Blood Sausages, Hakarl. Pickles, Smoked Fish, Canned Veggies, Yogurt, Cheese, Ham are all processed products, made with lots of chemicals and designed to store for months or years without cold. Are all of these historically important foods objectionable to you?

Would SPAM be OK if it removed the ham? Its literally pork, salt and potato starch. I could make SPAM at home with a 5 minute grocery store run to buy salt, pork and starch, and sodium nitrate (or celery)

So once, again, what is your objection to this processing? Do you consider boiled pork mince, salt, celery juice, and starch excessive processing?

> Kimchi, Sauerkraut, Blood Sausages, Hakarl. Pickles, Smoked Fish, Canned Veggies, Yogurt, Cheese, Ham are all processed products, made with lots of chemicals and designed to store for months or years without cold. Are all of these historically important foods objectionable to you?

You were the one arguing that SPAM isn't highly processed food in a can, that's what my objection was. I consider every one of those foods you listed processed in some way as is most of the food we eat because cooking is processing. Grinding is processing. Chopping is processing. All of them have tradeoffs in nutrition, texture, taste, and preservation.

You seem to have taken it personally, as if I'm making some sort of judgement on your diet. I don't care, I'm done with this nonsense.

The nitrite is probably the most objectionable part? Linked to colon/stomach cancer iirc.

My non-expert impression is that there’s a growing body of research that suggests that preservatives generally aren’t great for your gut microbiome. Which kind of makes sense, they’re meant to kill microbiota that would be eating your food before you do, it seems likely that it’d put selective pressure on those in your gut once you eat it, and maybe the ones that are most adapted to surviving that aren’t the ones you want a lot of.

We'd be better off as a species if Kelloggs and the rest gets deleted. There are wholegrain cereals that taste great and are healthy. There is no need for this dopamine hacking crap that try to trick people with their marketing schemes.

You not a food scientist but definitely an expert in making assumptions. To make your own meals you need to know how to cook and be able to afford the stuff. If you don't have the fortunate upbringing to learn how to cook you need to find time and be prepared to spend what little money you have on potential straight to the garbage experiments. That's not going to happen for a lot of people just because you don't risk throwing away time AND money. Sure, well cooked budgeted meals are an amazing way to save money and eat well. It just isn't that simple to come by.

I agree, but I think you're overestimating the difficulty of producing something edible. Not good, but edible.

Edible doesn't motivate you to improve when the previous option was actually tasty.

That’s a bit hyperbolic, its trivial to hard boil some eggs, and there are a number of similarly simple dishes that you’re not going to need to retry a bunch.

And still you need better food options if you want to beat tasty processed stuff. After a month on"simple" food, the other stuff will look even better.

There is nothing inherently wrong with highly-processed food. For one, the term "highly-processed" is often loosely used and subjectively defined. This is apparent in the fact you think canned foods are unhealthy, whereas the commenter responding to you sees nothing wrong with pasteurizing food in cans.

For two, highly-processed foods can contain nutritional value, the two aren't mutually exclusive. If the battle is against foods with little nutritional value then then just say that. "Highly-processed" is such a red herring in the nutrition industry.

If they had to label the ingredients on an apple, you wouldn’t understand all those words either.

a hard boiled egg and a baked potato is going to be a better breakfast nutritionally anyway. cereal is junk food marketed as healthy.

Last Time eat such, it was so sweet, I would Not even consider it good as a cookie.

The term "Greedflation" is the stupidest thing to come out of the last couple years and is pure propaganda. It's a misunderstand of cause and effect. It's pushing blame for a problem the government created onto companies for not just eating the loss. It's absurd.

The economy was mismanaged and we had a massive spike in inflation. Your costs went up, businesses costs went up. Everyone's did. To maintain their business they are forced to raise their prices or shrink their product. Blaming inflation on "greed" is literally scapegoating.

The idea that businesses should keep their prices the same in spite of dwindling profit margins is just silly.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/07/06/greedflation-is...

It's a slightly vague term. Greedflation is companies using existing inflation as cover to increase prices faster than costs thus increasing their profit margins.

Show me one goddamn "dwindling profit margin".

https://companiesmarketcap.com/kellogg-company/revenue/

Kellogg, down 15% in the last year

That's a market cap, not a profit margin

There's a shortage of competition. This in turn gives companies more power to set prices. Previously they wouldn't have had the same latitude to pass rising costs onto consumers. Instead this would've eaten into their margins. You can gripe about the term, but it's descriptive of a real phenomenon.

Greedflation is the term describing inflation way over and above what it should have been.

Profits are not dwindling, they are better than they’ve ever been across most sectors. In addition, corporate ability to hide profit has been growing.

I think you just misunderstand how bad inflation really is. Costs have risen by conservative estimates 18.7% since 2020. When your money is worth 18.7% less, anything less than an increase in "profit" of 18.7% dollar value is actually a loss because the value of the numbers has changed.

Dude no.

Profit is represented as a portion of revenue, not inflation. If profit margin growth had to match inflation, then eventually, a company would be expected to have higher profit than revenue, which obviously makes no sense.

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