You can finally get Cheerios in a resealable bag.
General Mills announced Tuesday it partnered with SC Johnson’s Ziploc brand for Cheerios with Ziploc PantrySeal, its trademarked name for a new bag design. It features a blue Ziploc seal that goes partially across the top of the bag and doubles as a handy pour spout. The specialty box is available only for Cheerios and Honey Nut Cheerios and exclusively at Walmart’s website, where a 14.4 oz box retails for about $5.
It’s a wonder it took so long. General Mills says it receives hundreds of thousands of requests for resealable cereal bags each year. The company says market research shows nine in 10 cereal lovers already either fold, roll, or clip their cereal bags in addition to closing the cereal box to preserve freshness, or transfer their cereal to another container. Still, General Mills says, it took quite a bit of development and testing to finally make one.
“With nearly one box of Cheerios produced every second, we needed to develop a solution that could work reliably at scale while still delivering the simple intuitive experience our consumers were seeking,” Emilie Knox, General Mills vice president and business unit director for Cheerios, tells Fast Company.
The bags are produced at the company’s Buffalo facility, which is where Cheerios were first made in 1941, and General Mills says it had to make sure it could produce the bag without any disruptions to its existing production.
Malt-O-Meal, which sells off-brand cereal brands like Tootie Fruities and Berry Colossal Crunch, introduced its own cereal bag zippers in 1998. In 2011, its “Bag the Box” campaign helped launch bagged cereals, which it promoted as more environmentally conscious since it produced less waste, and which it still sells today. With its new bag, Cheerios is just now catching up.
General Mills doesn’t have any plans to announce resealable bags to other brands, but “we’re always listening to what consumers want and need,” Knox says.
Breakfast cereal sales generally have been shrinking, but the General Mills COO, Dana McNabb, said on the company’s earnings call last month that its cereal sales were up thanks to factors like smaller boxes at lower price points, protein cereals, and collaborations with the likes of KPop Demon Hunter and GloRilla. By adding a Ziploc seal to their top-selling cereal, General Mills is hoping to give consumers another reason to shop their brand.