Cereality Is Coming!

If John Kass' column featuring Gary was so astounding that you neglected to read the rest of Wednesday's Tribune, the Business section mentioned that Cereality -- see previous post http://www.lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=17108#17108 -- is going to be opening "two blocks north of the Sears Tower in late spring."

I had pegged this concept as locating near Northwestern, DePaul or some other college area -- most likely the South Loop if they wanted to be downtown. This seems like a really odd location; I don't see commuters and office workers chowing down on cereal for lunch the way college kids would.

>>Brent

.....CBOT & CBOE traders, maybe?

There are a LOT of students downtown - NU, SAIC, Loyola, DePaul, Columbia, Roosevelt, and the city colleges - but the respective downtown campuses are all pretty far from Franklin or Wacker Dr.
Too far from the Mart, too - and once people who work in the Tower get in, they stay in, given the rigamarole it takes to reenter.


Weird.

This will be a boon to Peter Daane.

The City Colleges of Chicago are right around the corner on Franklin.

It has landed!

Chicago location OPENS June 27th

Cereality (click to view map)
100 S. Wacker (at Monroe)
Chicago, IL
312-506-0010

Our current hours
Monday - Friday
Saturday
Sunday

5am-7pm
8am-3pm
(closed)

I don't get it.

Another forum I belong to also posted this as a possible ethereal eating experience... a bar full of cereal? uhmm...

How many of their cereals are made on-premises? I assume they're not just opening boxes of what you could get at Jewel.

nr706 wrote:How many of their cereals are made on-premises? I assume they're not just opening boxes of what you could get at Jewel.

You assume wrong.

When you walk up to a Cereality, something immediately feels familiar. That's because we serve dozens of brand-name cereals (both hot and cold), just waiting to be combined.

And ordering at Cereality is easy. Pick two cereals and a topping. Be creative. We'll mix it up, and then you add as much milk as you like (including soy and lactose-free).

NR706,

Your assumption, though wrong (as gleam points out), is justified. It takes people a while to believe that this business proposition is for real. It sounds kind of silly to me, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a hit (especially around colleges and universities).

Hammond

"There's a Sucker Born Every Minute"

P. T. Barnum

I don't think it's much different than going to Starbucks or Subway...you can get coffee, deli meat, and bread pretty easily at Jewel too...

The selling point is the mixing & matching of cereals and toppings...so you're creating a unique bowl of cereal that you couldn't at home (at least without buying multiple boxes) as in:

"It's noon on Monday, and I'm sitting down to a big bowl of Cocoa Puffs mixed with Lucky Charms doctored with an extra scoop of Lucky Charms marshmallows, then topped off with crushed malted milk balls."
Trib article

I'm hoping to try it sometime soon, although that's gonna require me to either have cereal for lunch or wake up 30 minutes early...

I'm going to open up a place with 800 different kinds of pop so that they can be combined.

Hopefully Cereality will have the lifespan of the pet rock.

saps wrote:I'm going to open up a place with 800 different kinds of pop so that they can be combined.

Hopefully Cereality will have the lifespan of the pet rock.

Just imagine mixing Dr. Pepper with Orange and Grape soda! Mmm... delicious!

clogoodie wrote:I don't think it's much different than going to Starbucks or Subway...you can get coffee, deli meat, and bread pretty easily at Jewel too...

Not precisely. Unlike pouring a bowl of cereal, there's a lot more to coffee and sandwiches than just bringing home the goods and putting them on the pantry shelf. For example, making a good cup of coffee (not Nescafe) is time-consuming and requires the right equipment, the perfect grind, filtered water, yadda-yadda (just ask any barrista you meet). Even Subway does the laborious chopping and slicing of vegetables, meat and bread for you. Plus, in addition to the service, at each of these places you are paying a premium for fresh food and drink served in small quantities; unless you eat a lot of sandwiches or go through a lot of coffee, the ingredients can go stale if you stockpile them at home. So you pay a premium for that convenience -- a convenience Cereality clearly does NOT provide, to wit:

Dry cereal, unlike good coffee and fresh vegetables, stays fresh for months at a time. All you have to do is roll down the freaking bag and seal the top of the G-D box. If you want to keep 5, 10 or even more types of cereal in the house -- go ahead! It will be ready for you when you are ready for it. Or you could just go to Cereality and pay per bowl what a box of cereal costs at home.

For gosh sake, all Cereality has to worry about spoiling is the milk -- the cereal just has to be changed out seasonally, like snow tires. Unlike fresh coffee, vegetables and meats, that's no different than your own home pantry.

Just my two cents.

JiLS

And to think that my in-laws have been eating this breakfast for years (cereal topped with other cereal, your choice of a number of varieties, then topped with your choice of several fruits and fruit flavored yogurts) and I've been resisting it (all of it except the fruit, cereal to me is kibbled people food) and been seen as the family oddball who would rather have a piece of hot buttered toast with a nice ripe tomato sliced on top with, omigod, salt and pepper! (We visit in tomato season).

I am so not with it. First, I don't like pluots or peaches without pits, now cereality totally evades me, concept-wise.

Maybe it tastes good because it comes in Chinese take-out containers (see photo in yesterday's Sun-Times, photo not available in on-line version). Maybe they think they're eating leftover Chinese (or Thai, or Vietnamese) perhaps the best breakfast food in the world.

I package my Xmas food treats for colleagues and friends in Chinese take-out boxes for just this reason. I mean, I think they're tasty, but some people might think dried, stuffed, candied fruits are weird, but if you can fool them into thinking it's leftover Chinese, well, what's not to like?

Do people wear their pj's to Cereality? That's another thing I don't get. I mean, I have some plaid pj pants, but I wouldn't think of wearing them in public. I am barely comfortable sneaking out onto my back porch to water plants in them.

I'm made to feel like an oddball at the in-laws cereal bar because I want breakfast before I get dressed, and appear at the table in my pj's. But I've seen people wearing pj's from as near as the UIC campus and as far as the street outside the stock exchange in Santiago, Chile.

But then again, fashion-wise, I must be soooooo not with it, but that's an unsuitable subject for a food board:-)

I guess I've been a bit surprised by the negative views towards Cereality...I think it's an interesting concept that could succeed, and I'm eager to try it. It's certainly not a good value, but it definitely wouldn't be a daily or weekly visit...maybe once a month before work. For the record, I'm not a regular cereal eater - my cereal tends to turn stale and my milk turn bad before I finish either of them - so maybe that's why the concept has some appeal to me.

My point was that it doesn't take much more time or effort to make an halfway decent cup of coffee or sandwich from ingredients you'd get at the store than it does to pour a bowl of cereal, but we've proved ourselves to be quite willing to purchase those items at a premium from various establishments. (Given your point of shelf-life variation, perhaps a better example would be our willingness to buy bottled water?) Therefore, considering what else we pay premiums for, it just doesn't seem ridiculous to think there's a market of people out there who will buy cereal from Cereality.

Indeed.

gleam wrote:

Indeed.

So these are the typical customers? Hmmm ... O.K., I take back everything I said.

clogoodie wrote:I guess I've been a bit surprised by the negative views towards Cereality...I think it's an interesting concept that could succeed, and I'm eager to try it. It's certainly not a good value, but it definitely wouldn't be a daily or weekly visit...maybe once a month before work. For the record, I'm not a regular cereal eater - my cereal tends to turn stale and my milk turn bad before I finish either of them - so maybe that's why the concept has some appeal to me.

Well, one solution that I am happy with is to marry a cereal eater. Since about three days in a row about three times a year I want to eat Cheerios, I just always have a box on hand. They're not his cereal (Himself is a flake preferring person) but he will sometimes help out and eat them if we're short on flakes and the Cheerios have been hanging around for awhile.

Also, I feed them to the little parrot. He prefers flakes from Himself (coated with milk, not good for parrots but in insignificant amounts) but prefers O's from me.

Now, one might wonder how could a bird could be so discerning? (He'll try to bite me if I try to give him a flake, but will gently take an O from my hand.)

And, frankly, I don't know. It's probably related to his ability to recognize (in a phobic way) that brooms, mops, dust-busters, vacumn cleaners and those wool dusters are all part of a category that relates to cleaning.

But, again, I stray off the food topic. So, for good measure, the current issue of Gastronomica (an outrageously priced magazine) has a vicious exchange about parrot eating. If it were online, it would be the flame war equivalent of a dry lightning strike in the West in a drought.

I, of course, would never think of eating my little parrot. At only 4.5 oz, he is not big enough, but more importantly, he has mastered the crow call, and scares the crows away quite nicely.

gleam wrote:

Indeed.

Well, they are Sun Devil gals, right?


BTW, keep in mind that this place is just across the river from the Merc, and on the way to the CBOT from the Madison St. Metra station....this place could be a gold mine. Seriously.

*scoff* Trixies. No wonder this place didn't open in Hyde Park... we're too smart to fall for it!

no great loss...

I think the problems included a bad value, no coffee, lack of anything that was uniquely "their own".

I was somewhat intrigued by the concept, and even tried to like their oatmeal, but it was way too "off the shelf".

Even their variations on rice krispy treats were just not special enough.

For me the Potbelly right up the street was the deal killer -- better to get a hot breakfast sandwich or ice cream cookie sandwich for a lower price.