Cheerios

Launching the gluten-free version of a favorite brand

Role: Writer and Editor

Cheerios had recently found a way to make most of their products gluten-free. But the story was complicated to tell and full of technical details, and they were worried it would make current consumers think the product itself had changed.

Cheerios wanted to tell the story of how they’d overhauled their oat sorting process to make their product gluten-free. And they wanted to put that story on the back of the box. But the only way they knew how to tell it was by talking about how they’d created a new kind of sieving machine to sort barley and wheat out of their oat harvests, and to say, again and again, how safe it was.

We needed a way to tell the story that felt more personal, more relatable, and, above all, more interesting.

Our team worked with theirs to get to the root of the push for gluten-free Cheerios, and, in the end, discovered the story of Phil, the Cheerios employee who worked for years to create gluten-free Cheerios so his daughter and her children could enjoy the product to which he’d devoted his whole life.

That was a story worthy of the back of the box.

With FDA regulations and a massive brand team (due to the multiple brands the project affected) to contend with, the review process was extensive. But in the end we were able to tell a story that was accurate to the technical details, that made it clear the product was simply a safer version of what it had always been, and, maybe most importantly, that focused on family rather than factories.

And it was pretty neat to see it come to life on millions of cereal boxes, too.