A Review of MyCereal.com

Like Reflect.com, MyCereal.com is a website offering product customisation. Reflect.com offers beauty supplies, and has $50M of Proctor & Gamble's research, development, and formulae behind it. MyCereal.com is General Mills, bringing you all of the ingredients they currently have available for breakfast cereals. General Mills includes the following brands: Cheerios, Chex, Total, Wheaties, Golden Grahams, and such sugar highs as Cocoa Puffs, Cookie Crisp, Trix, Lucky Charms, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The shapes and flavours available on MyCereal.com are familiar to probably every palette in plenty of countries.

What can I get?
In short (in long comes later), you can customise what you want in your cereal, and place an order for "servings" that come in plastic pouches or plastic bowls. I went for pouches, hoping to have less to discard or recycle. Orders can be between 7 and 42 servings in 7-serving intervals (huh?) and cost around 99 cents per serving plus a marginal shipping fee for 2nd day Federal Express.

Sounds Great
The beauty to business models like these is that they're relatively not scary to try out. They take products that already exist at these companies, and for the most part, change their combination, packaging, and delivery. Whether the custom cereal is put together manually or by machine, I don't know. Packaging is different in that the cardboard box and all of the marketing that went into it is gone. So you save money on not needing the marketing and to fit on shelves, and you spend new money in newer lighter packaging that makes it easy and cost-effective to ship right to the consumer. Delivery is different in that these orders are not being shrinkwrapped in a warehouse and put on a truck. They are individually packaged in a small brown box with a Fed Ex label.

Yes, what changed costs money, which is clearly reflected in the cost of the servings. My box of New Morning Organic Corn Flakes cost me $3.67 including tax for nine 30 gram servings (270g total). My "FruitSoyRice" order cost me $10.93 including shipping for seven 52 gram servings (364g total). Crunching some numbers, 52 grams of Corn Flakes cost me $0.71 while 52 grams of my customised serial cost $1.56, twice as much as my boxed serial. So the question to the consumer is: will you pay twice as much for someone to mix the cereal into little pouches for you and deliver it to your door? I've decided that at this price, I'd probably buy some of my custom cereal when I'm going to travel. I always bring food when I travel since my diet is fairly limited, so knowing I have something to eat that fits my restricted diet is an important plan B. For me personally, I wouldn't replace buying boxes of cereal at the store unless the price of MyCereal came down and they offered more all natural and organic ingredients. So for now, it's New Morning Corn Flakes with Flax rich in Omega-3 and New Morning Crispy Brown Rice. :)

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