Sunday, June 18, 2017

Sugary Cereals and deceptive pricing

When you are walking thru Grocery aisle, you will see sweetest cereals with cheapest price.
I wanted to break it down for understanding.

You can find Nutrition facts from one of gluten free cereal from a leading brand below: (source: https://www.postconsumerbrands.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Pebbles_CinnamonPebbles.pdf)

Now Let's break this down.
This cereal contents two sources of carbs: a) rice b) sugar. As per nutrition facts, every 30 gram of cereal has 10 gram sugar. Essentially when you buy 15 oz of cereal (425 grams), it has 5 oz (140 grams) of sugar. 

How does the pricing for this work? 
Walmart sells a 15 oz box of serial at $3.12.  That seem to indicate that 1 oz of cereal is $0.21 ($0.208).

But that is deceptive.  
Walmart sells Great Value cane sugar at price of $3.02 for 4 lb, which is 64 oz. Which means price of 1 oz of sugar is $0.047. 5 oz of sugar comes to $0.23 (mind you, I have not pickup corn syrup or non-cane sugar which may be even cheaper - post doesn't indicate which type of sugar they have used)

Essentially
At $3.12, you are purchasing 10 oz of serial and and $0.23 worth of sugar.
Your net cost of cereal is $2.89 for 10 oz of cereal (and  $0.23 for 5 oz of sugar). Essentially your cereals are costing $0.29 per oz (consisting of mostly rice).

Almost all cereal manufacturers are to blame for such products .While there is potentially no mechanism to make a gluten free cereal taste good - pumping it with sugar should not be the way to do it.

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