Breakfast All Day
Cereality Cereal Bar & Café brings a fresh and innovative concept to the fast-casual restaurant industry.

This summer, Cereality Cereal Bar & Café is bringing its new cereal-all-day concept to Chicago's Loop. Already operating two successful stores at the Arizona State University campus in Tempe, Arizona, and at the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia, the Chicago-based company is branching out beyond the college campus circuit with its latest location in the heart of Chicago's urban core.

“Originally there was a focus on college campuses and college students because they are a good test market,” says Ric Smith, senior vice president of store development for Cereality. “This is the first location that isn't situated near a college campus because we believed the ubiquity of cereal — 95 percent of us eat it — could do well for office workers as well as college kids. Seeing families coming to the University of Pennsylvania location on the weekends, some coming from close by and others from a long distance, really opened up our strategy. That's why now, as we go forward, we're really looking at going into dense office complexes in the city in urban trade areas, such as in Chicago.”

Located at 100 South Wacker across from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the 1,330-square-foot store's cozy design mirrors the different rooms of a house. The front area, with a grab-and-go atmosphere, resembles a kitchen with cereal boxes lined up inside see-through cabinets behind the counter. A two-tiered kitchen island provides seating for those customers who want to linger. Several televisions will be set up throughout — some tuned to cartoons to play off of the childlike atmosphere, others to financial news networks to cater to the businessman stopping in on his way to work. Though the Chicago store does not have enough space, most locations will also have a family room vignette with a breakfast table.

“One of the things that is going to be neat in this store is we've designed one of the service areas to be shaped like a bowl,” Smith says. “In that area, they will make the hot oatmeal. We've tried to set up the store so there's a little bit of theater around that where you can actually watch them preparing the oatmeal.”

It is that unique experience — complete with pajama-top wearing “cereologists” — that David Roth, one of the two company's co-founders, wants to create to keep customers coming back for more.

“We've taken cereal from commodity to experience, which is really cool, and people come back and crave it,” Roth says. “We offer [the cereal] in a really unique and novel way, in ways that people would never have anywhere else. A very limited amount of our sales comes from people coming in and saying ‘I want my Cheerios the way I normally have it.' They come in and have new experiences and try things they've never tried before.”

“Because you're selling to some degree a commodity, what you have to do is make sure that the brand and the experience you have in your stores is what keeps people coming back,” Smith says. “So besides offering innovative, unique ways of serving the product, we have to create a great, comfortable environment and great service.”

But, it is the product itself that is the initial draw. And with more than 30 brand name cereals to choose from — not to mention the 30-plus different toppings, granola, cereal bars, parfaits and “Slurrealities,” the company's unique take on smoothies — Cereality does not serve up a typical bowl of cereal. At the Philadelphia store, one of the most popular menu items is Life Experience, which combines Life cereal with almonds, honey and banana. Devil Made Me Do It, a concoction of Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms, chocolate milk flavor-crystals and malt balls, is one of the company's more unique blends. Prices range from approximately $2 for one scoop of cereal to approximately $4 for a signature smoothie.

With three additional Chicago stores planned to open by year-end, the company's short term goal is to grow in the Chicagoland area.

“We're also looking at southern California as a potential market to grow into in 2006, and we're really looking to get 15 locations open during the next 12 months,” Smith says.

Besides college campus and office building locations, Cereality hopes to open future stores in retail settings, such as malls, lifestyle centers and smaller strip centers. Bookstores, fitness centers, specialty retail, theaters and specialty grocery stores represent the company's ideal tenant mix.

“The key to any good site selection is bringing in a lot of traffic, so we're looking for those traffic generators, as well as complimentary uses,” Smith says. “An ideal scenario in a small strip center might be a Starbucks on one end, a Chipotle or Potbelly Sandwich Works on the other and then us in the middle. A larger, lifestyle center would have sort of the same kind of quick-casual restaurants, as well as a Chico's or Barnes & Noble. I think one of the things we bring to the table is that we have a fair amount of our business in the mornings, which is an appealing aspect for a shopping center because there aren't that many tenants that are open at 6 o'clock in the morning.”

Though excited about the company's numerous prospects, Roth believes a cautious expansion plan is key to Cereality's future success.

“Our challenge is to grow the company carefully and thoughtfully so we don't just jump in, meet all the demand and not have the right system to really sustain a good business model and deliver quality to customers one at a time, over and over,” Roth says. “We are very concerned for excellent customer service.”

Roth and Smith agree that it is the universal appeal of the product, combined with the friendly and unique setting, that has made their stores such a hit.

“I think what's made [Cereality] successful is that people eat cereal everyday, and it's a product they can relate to,” Smith says. “We're simply providing a warm and unique environment where they can get a product they're familiar with in a new and different way.”

“It's all about innovation and surprise and delight,” Roth says. “That's what gets people behind us.”

— Lindsey Walker