Happy Halloween everyone!I was in the supermarket yesterday morning buying candy for trick or treaters, and decided to run a little mental exercise. I asked myself, what are the three largest products categories in the store, in terms of choice and variety? I did a quick lap around, and here's what I came up with:
1. Cereal
2. Potato Chips
3. Toothpaste
Numbers 1 & 2 didn't surprise me, but the third did. You'd never think toothpaste would make this list, but maybe that's because the product tends to be smaller, and come in palm-sized packaging. But look for yourself next time your in a supermarket. "Whitening," "now with Scope," "Tartar control," "citrus splash"...these are the descriptors consumers want, and the toothpaste people are listening. Each brand now has a laundry list of extension products, flavor selection is approaching the rainbow-status of Vitamin Water, and the result is one of the dense-ist aisle gauntlets in the store.
Now in terms of cereal, the fact that they were my clear #1 shouldn't surprise anyone. There are more variations of Raisin Bran than there are gossip magazines at the checkout. The selection of names runs a gamut from cartoon characters (Count Chocula) to Biblical references (Ezekiel 4:9). Every fruit, nut and grain in the world is present and accounted for in some form or another.
Recognizing that the cereal world now has such a complete selection of ingredients made me think of an innovative new business I saw online, named Moja Mix. A build-your-own-cereal service, Moja Mix essentially plops someone into the cereal aisle, tears the box tops off everything, and lets customers pick and choose what they want and the dosage size. Face it – the cereal aisle is as vast and huge as the world itself, with recipes and flavor combinations as culturally representative as a UN summit. Something like this, that puts the customer in charge, seems like a natural progression.
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