How Breakfast Has Changed
General Mills understood that the conventional model of a sit-down family breakfast had changed, but didn't know where it was going or how to respond. To help them, we designed an immersive ethnographic program to understand eating habits in the morning and the meanings of food across the day. We arrived at consumers' homes at 6 a.m., armed with video cameras and notebooks. Through close observation, it soon became clear that breakfast had become an individualized and intermittent series of snacks eaten up to 11:00 a.m.
Based on this finding, we helped General Mills develop product ideas that fit into this new form of breakfast. One of our ideas turned into Go-Gurt, a portable yogurt for kids that's healthy enough for parents to give to their kids any time of the day and is cool enough for kids to eat during their morning recess.