My Stale Shredded Wheat: A Critique of the Cereal Box
It’s 7:00am on a Monday. Dreary-eyed, I reluctantly get out of bed, slip my feet into plush slippers, and wash up. Since my stomach is rumbling, I make my way to the kitchen for a typical breakfast to start my day. I’m excited to open my new box of Kashi Shredded Wheat so I proceed to pry the cardboard top open with my fingers (which always seems to rip the box in every way other than the way I intended). Next, I tear the plastic bag open, and after a lot of struggling, a fountain of shredded wheat comes flying out. Great. Now I have half the amount of cereal and a bag that is ripped not only on the top but along the side.
Personally, I think there are fundamental flaws in cereal box design:
Cereal Box 101
Just when I think the frustration is over, when I pour the cereal out of the bag, it goes in every direction other than the direction of my bowl because the top of the bag is so unevenly ripped from my struggles. Don’t get me wrong — I like the idea of having a box of cereal since it is a clean design and having a bag inside a box prevents the cereal from getting stuck in the crevices of the box. In fact, there are several reasons why cereal boxes are rectangular prisms: hundreds of them can fit in a larger box when transported, there’s a lot of surface area for companies to market their product with colorful imagery, there are several ways to stack the boxes (on top of each other or side-by-side), the two large faces allow you to have the information displayed in two different languages, and the smaller faces are perfect spaces for displaying nutrition facts and ingredient information. Companies might also design cereal boxes as rectangular prisms because they fit easily on a person’s kitchen shelf, especially if the person has several cereals to choose from (the small side faces outwards and fits nicely into a person’s hand so they can make a quick selection). Not to mention the cost of producing cardboard boxes is pretty cheap versus other materials, such as aluminum. It also doesn’t take much time to fold cardboard into boxes to produce hundreds of cereal boxes, which is both efficient and scalable.
But is it really that easy to learn to use a cereal box? It’s generally simple to figure out how to open and use, but I often open the box from the wrong side, which I then cannot reseal. And once I can’t reseal the box and bag, I know I’ll have stale cereal the next morning. However, after multiple tries, once I’ve figured out how to open the box from the correct side, it’s easy to remember how to open the same brand of cereal’s box. The cereal box design is not extremely efficient because there’s wasted space in the cardboard box between the box and the bag. A possible solution would be to have the plastic bag glued to the box so that the customer is actually getting the volume of cereal that is advertised on the cover. Some boxes like Annie’s have directions on where to open the box but most do not have very affordable designs.
So what would make the perfect cereal box, you ask?
The first feature that comes to mind is making the general shape of the cereal box shorter and slightly more cubic so that it doesn’t topple over easily and spill all of its contents onto your shelf. I would include clear and visible directions for which side the user should open the box along with a clasp that is deep enough to actually close the box. The key feature is having the plastic bag glued to the inside of the box to prevent the bag from bulging and not fitting back inside the box once opened along with a resealable zip-top that fully closes the bag to ensure the cereal does not get stale.
And with just a few simple tweaks, your morning breakfast experience can be so much more pleasant!
