HealthPak Gets Serious About Revamping their Breakfast Cereals

Published on May 16, 2017

When we decided to relaunch our cereal range we were driven by three major influences: taste, health and demand.

Our Serious Cereal range has always relied on an unbeatable combination of price and product to ensure that cafes, hotels, motels, guest houses, B&Bs – even airlines – have the perfect range of portion control breakfast cereals for their guests. In a nutshell, they taste great, store well and you have much less waste than if you bulk-buy loose product.

But at HealthPak we’re not content to rest on what we already know is a top quality product – instead last year we set out to improve the range.

The first thing we’ve decided to do is to reduce the amount of sugar in each serving. This isn’t because people have been contacting us to say they think our Honey Pops are too sweet or the Cranberry Crunch is too sugary, but simply because we think we have a duty to prepare and provide healthy breakfast cereals for businesses across the country.

Last year a Consumer NZ survey found that although sugar in kids’ cereals had gone down from 27% to 21% over the previous three years, there were still 27 out of 50 cereals analysed that contained high levels of sugar and 21 that had two or more teaspoons of sugar per 30g serving.

With this in mind, we’ve set out to create the healthiest range of breakfast cereals we could while still keeping the same great taste your guests demand.

Our general manager sales & marketing, Jimi Kennedy-Grant, says the decision to come up with a new recipe was driven by HealthPak’s philosophy of doing good for both the environment and the consumer.

“On reducing sugar, we were more conscious of never having had someone complain about the cereals while also realising that we make hundreds of thousands of these portion control packets each year and the old recipe was, on average, regularly high in sugar and we have a duty of care so that we not only have to make our products the best they can be, but also the healthiest they can be.”

Central to changing the recipe was ensuring that we maintained the tastiness of our cereals – and, as anyone who has visited our Facebook page can attest to – that means carrying out the incredibly enjoyable stage of taste-testing the new products as rigorously as possible.

As well as the strict science involved in creating a new recipe, there’s also a lot of personality involved in the development of the new cereal range – and we certainly didn’t want to disappoint loyal fans. And they don’t come much more loyal when it comes to the Best Breakfast combination of cereals and exotic fruits than Jimi’s seven-year-old daughter.

“My seven-year-old is besotted with Best Breakfast and because we wanted to reduce the sugar level in that we did a couple of tests and only when had her seal of approval did we go ahead,” Jimi says.

“It started as a joke because she’s its number-one fan but I literally don’t know how many incarnations we went through before we got her two thumbs up! It’s a serious consideration when you change a recipe, though. There’s no use doing these things just based on the nutritional panel, they’ve got to be the best product they can be and the only way to do that is to get as many people as possible to test them.”

Another new product in the cereal range that has been through its testing did come about because of requests from our customers. The demand for gluten-free cereals has increased dramatically over recent years, and in response we will be releasing gluten-free rice puffs and corn flakes as part of the relaunch.

Our revamped Serious Cereal range is here and ready to give your guests a seriously good start to their day!

For more information on HealthPak’s café supplies or food and beverage ranges for guest accommodation, call us on +64 9 579 6268, email us at info@healthpak.co.nz or contact us via our website.