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
