We are happy cows: the new cereal from Kelloggs

Breakfast for me is a serious business: it’s got to be slow release, with protein, and low GI. I’m not an ascetic, I just like food too much: I’d no more eat a Twix for breakfast than I would for dinner. For this reason, I have completely ignored the high-stacked boxes of Kellogg’s new cereal Krave: you might just as well crumble some chocolate digestives  into a glass of milk. Easy to see what the concept is, though:  if the chocolate was on the outside, you’d think it was candy. Put the chocolate inside, and it’s a breakfast cereal.

But then last night, I saw a couple in my local Tesco  laughing their heads off at the display, picking up a box, examining it and saying ‘That’s so funny.” As they put the box  back and left, I just heard the tail end of a sentence “….I wonder…East Europeans”.

I looked again to see what could have been so funny, and mentally factored in the last two words I heard, East European. Then a slavic penny dropped. For in many East European languages (Slovakian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, for example), krava means ‘cow’. In Croatian and a few other languages, Krave (pronounced |kráh-veh, as in ‘Ave Maria’) is the plural, ‘cows’.  So there you have it: Cows the new cereal from Kelloggs. For the sake of balance and fairness, I should tell you that when I was shopping in Belgrade about 30 years ago, I  noticed a brand  of  fly-killer  called Bum!

Coincidentally, I find food retail fascinating. Reading about Krave from Talking Retail you’ll find that the aim is to meet a market for people who don’t really want breakfast but, erm, uh, OK, I’ll have some chocolate. These aren’t children, by the way, they’re 16-25 year olds, and one of the target groups is music festivals and University students.  ‘ “There’s a huge opportunity to grow breakfast and cereal consumption within the adult market by retaining young adults in the habit of eating breakfast,” said Mike Taylor, Kellogg’s sales director.’ An idea of how the big social marketing campaign for Krave has gone down with students can be gauged from responses to it in The Student Room. Nice to see that Universities are producing independent critical thought.

See also Krave and the decline of the Coco-Pop from allbusiness

The Cosmoba, restaurant in Bloomsbury off Southampton Row

I can’t walk anywhere in Bloomsbury without being wistfully rushed back in time to when I was a student at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies back in 1978-81. And nowhere holds more potent memories for me of that time than the Cosmoba in Cosmo place just off Southampton Row.  God rot the internet, however much I may love it: when I try to think what was so special about the Cosmoba, it’s not just that it was in a tiny corner of London that feels like a wonderful guilty secret, it was the warmth of friends, conversation and being out and about after dark.

So last year when, after about 28 years of losing contact, I met up with my  friend  Jackie from college, we decided to see if by any remote chance the Cosmoba was still there. Well, would you believe it, there it was, and it seemed much the same in so many ways, even down to the red wine, chicken kiev and zabaglione that was about the only thing I would ever order, once I’d found out how good it was.

We’re going again soon, so since I was cycling past Cosmo place on my way back from the IoE on Monday, I thought I’d double check that it’s still still there. And yes, it is.

It probably wasn’t called Scoffers at the time, but it looks exactly as I remember it. I stumbled across it again recently, almost 20 years after first going there. It was one of those places that you wander into without really knowing where you are because you’re walking & talking and  geography is the last thing on your mind.  I thought I’d never find it again, and that even if I did, it wouldn’t be there. So here it is, and for you too (you know who you are). And just in case I lose it again, it’s at 6, Battersea Rise.