Kellogg's CEO Wants You to Eat Cereal for Dinner to Save Money

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Last year, the Wall Street Journal had a suggestion for consumers struggling with the rising prices of eggs, which were widely attributed to price-gouging: Just skip breakfast! Do people without yachts really need to eat breakfast anyway? Isn’t it more important that we uphold the unethical wealth of a few old white men who have clearly never cracked open a book more intellectual than The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in their lives than it is for the majority of us to eat the most important meal of the day?

Well, that was 2023, and times have changed. These days, we’re allowed to have breakfast, we’re just supposed to have it at night. In the form of a bowl of cereal. Instead of an actual dinner. At least, that’s what more consumers should be doing, said Gary Pilnick, the CEO of WK Kellogg Co, the cereal company that makes a product so delicious, so sensually pleasurable that it was originally designed to curb masturbation.

During the interview in which Pilnick made this suggestion, CNBC host Carl Quintanilla asked about rising grocery costs. Pilnick’s response detailed one of his company’s marketing campaigns in which consumers are urged to enjoy sugary cereal for dessert. “The cereal category has always been quite affordable, and it tends to be a great destination when consumers are under pressure. If you think about the cost of cereal for a family versus what they might otherwise do, that’s going to be much more affordable,” said Pilnick.

I have nothing against cereal for dinner, okay? During periods of particularly bad mental health, I too have poured myself some Rice Krispies and dissociated while inhaling the entire bowl of cold carbs over the sink. And I’m sure that many families, either due to a lack of funds or a lack of time, sometimes opt for cereal for dinner over other more delicious and nutritious options.

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But honestly, making this suggestion so earnestly, so wholeheartedly on national television is just so unabashedly stupid that it has drained what (very) little trust I still had in our economic hierarchy. Pilnick has, obviously, quite predictably, faced enormous backlash from this conversation. During the interview, Quintanilla even asked Pilnick whether he thought this kind of messaging could “land the wrong way,” and Pilnick just doubled down on the cereal for breakfast rhetoric, apparently ignorant of the growing economic resentment that seems to be bubbling to the surface of public life.

We should be more than concerned that people like Pilnick and C-suite executives at other companies, who are compensated at absolutely ridiculous rates, have so much political and economic power. Nobody should be able to accumulate this kind of wealth and power when the United Nations reported that 2.4 million people faced moderate to severe food insecurity in 2022. But it’s even more frustrating when it becomes so obvious, like in this case with Pilnick, that these people have zero awareness of the world they’re living in. As other outlets have noted, it’s giving strong “let them eat cake” energy.

As a society, we should not be forgiving of these blunders when they happen. Pilnick, who the Washington Post reported was compensated $4.9 million last year before his promotion to CEO, should feel shame at this gaffe, shame at his warped perceptions of the world, shame at his truly stomach-turning willingness to profit off of the material suffering of people poorer than himself.

I wonder what kind of cereal Pilnick and his family are going to be eating for dinner tonight. I wonder whether he’s using his multi-million dollar salary to fill his bowl with a heaping serving of Froot Loops or Frosted Mini-Wheats. I wonder how much his lifespan will be shortened due to his frequent ingestion of ultra-processed, sugar-laden cereal. But mostly, I wonder what goes through his mind when he wakes up from pangs of hunger late at night because all he had was a bowl of cereal before bed. I wonder if—I hope that—he feels a hole in his center, at his core, that won’t go away no matter how many bowls of Corn Flakes he eats the night before.

Samantha Maxwell is a food writer and editor based in Boston. Follow her on Twitter at @samseating.

Kellogg’s CEO Wants You to Eat Cereal for Dinner to Save Money