Ron's View

The WSJ’s daily feature last Monday was a fabulous article about Grape Nuts. It turns out that Grape Nut production at Grape Nut’s historic home in Battle Creek, Michigan came to an end in 2005. The article focuses on the one remaining plant, in California’s San Joaquin Valley. An excerpt:

In 2005, four Grape Nuts ovens in Battle Creek were scrapped, leaving just the one here in California. With a share of the cereal market below 1%, the stuff was tilting toward crunchtime.

“We need to bring it back to life in a relevant way,” says Kelley Peters, the “insights” director who charts Grape Nuts psychographics for Ralcorp’s $5 million resuscitation attempt. Her target: men 45 years old and up. “Men aspire to it,” she says. “It’s strong and stern, the father figure of cereals.” Her marketing chief, Jennifer Marchant, points out: “It tends to break your teeth sometimes.”

True, but Grape Nuts loyalists don’t all welcome the focus on maleness. Sylvie Dale, 38, an editor in New Jersey, and a woman, says: “The rhythmic crunching that reverberates around your skull could be ambient sound meditation. To have the patience to get through a bowl, you have to practice mindfulness.” Ms. Dale adds: “I have a special place in my heart for this cereal.”

David Smith does, too, though he says, “I don’t want Grape Nuts and testosterone in the same sentence, ever.” As a teenager, he biked cross-country, eating the stuff out of a saddle bag. At 52, he sells flooring an hour’s drive from Battle Creek. His devotion to Grape Nuts remains constant. “It’s a cereal that doesn’t require much from me,” he says. “I guess it isn’t a real relationship.”

When Ms. Peters conducted psychological interviews for the ad campaign, she was sometimes asked how Grape Nuts are made. “I asked back,” she says, “how do you think they’re made?” Mr. Smith’s guess: “Wheat, barley and nuclear fusion.”

Fission is more like it.

That’s just a tease. Learn more by going to the article.

I love Grape Nuts myself, though I don’t eat them regularly. I go in phases. There’s the no-cereal phase, especially when we’re back on the South Beach diet. Then there’s the limited-cereal phase, during which I naturally gravitate to Grape Nuts. And the eat-anything phase, when I allow myself my true love, Rice Chex. No cereal is better wedded to milk than Rice Chex. Just the right amount of open space, the right density. It’s perfect. But grape nuts have their own special way of mixing with milk, provided you let them sit and soften a bit.

I miss them. The article came out on the very day that returned to phase one of the South Beach diet. Bad timing.