Kellogg’s joyböl seeks to jumpstart breakfast eating, targets time-strapped ‘deskfast’ eaters
“joyböl actually started out as an experiment to create breakfast that is easier to eat on the go or at work for the ‘deskfast’,” John King, senior director of global breakfast innovation at Kellogg, told FoodNavigator-USA.
“We noticed that especially in big cities and colleges people are living a very on-the-go lifestyle and changing their eating habits, turning snacks into meals and their desks into diners.”
According to King, Kellogg’s set up a standalone to team to develop joyböl using input from people in café’s, offices, and co-working spaces in major cities such as New York, Chicago and Austin.
What the team came up with was a ‘just-add-water’ portable smoothie bowl made with real fruit, whole grains, nuts, and seeds with 10-11g of protein (partly from soy protein isolate) per package.
The new smoothie bowls made their official debut at the NACS show in Baltimore, Maryland, last month with a range of flavors including chocolate hazelnut with granola clusters, mango coconut chia with black rice and pecans, strawberry almond quinoa crunch, matcha berry, and ‘superberries & acai’.
With millennials as a target audience, Kellogg’s has been building up its e-commerce business currently available through Amazon, Boxed.com, Walmart.com, Target.com, and Kroger.com, in addition to select cafés, offices, co-working spaces, some convenience stores, and 125 college campuses with further distribution plans in the works.
“We’ve started distribution for joyböl where millennials shop, which is disproportionately in out of home and online,” King said.
“They are more often on-the-go, in a rush and often have breakfast at their desk. joyböl was designed to be portable to fit this new type of lifestyle while still being delicious, satisfying, and completely customizable.”
State of the breakfast category
Breakfast’s reputation as ‘the most important meal of the day’ has been threatened in recent years, according to Mintel associate director of food & drink, Beth Bloom.
"Boosting the importance of breakfast is in order. Only about half of US adults think breakfast is more important than lunch or dinner, down from 2014, and less than half say it sets the tone for their day,” Bloom noted.
“Nevertheless, consumption is high. Opportunity for portable options is strong, with few weekday breakfast eaters doing so while in transit, others doing so at their destination."
According to Technomic’s Consumer Breakfast Trends Report (1,500 consumers surveyed) one-third of consumers – and 45% of millennials – are interested in food products that can they can pack with them on transport with 32% of consumers reporting they would likely order a breakfast bowl to go. The time window of when breakfast foods are consumed has expanded beyond morning hours as Technomic’s research shows 32% of consumers are eating breakfast foods as a mid-morning or afternoon snack.
King added that while a bowl of cereal remains one of the top most consumed breakfast foods with 90% of households purchasing cereal, convenience has become more a priority for time-crunched consumers who are now more likely to skip breakfast all together – Technomic research found that consumers reported skipping breakfast 2.3 times per week.
Despite cereal being a ubiquitous pantry item for most households, Kellogg's cereal sales have struggled quarter after quarter in the US and have returned to "stabilized performance" in Q3 2018, but the company said it will focus on other other areas of its portfolio for US growth including frozen breakfast food and single-serve snacks to gain consumer spending.
“They are searching for easily accessible, yet still delicious mini-meals that fit into their life,” King added.
