This is every child’s dream, every adult’s guilty pleasure, and every cereal lover’s new hotspot. We reviewed the exclusive Cereal Killer café in London, dedicated to: you guessed it – cereals from all around the world. Why hasn’t this genius plan been thought of before?
The review
Poppin’ Pebbles with semi skimmed milk
This will be a hit with most children and adults who remember the glorious taste of popping candy. The cereal consists of purple berry flavoured flakes, which is entangled with green popping candy balls. They erupt into sparkles on the back of your throat, not only conjuring a superb taste, but erecting old childhood memories of purchasing popping candy packets after school. Highly recommended for a day when you desire a cheeky sweet treat in the afternoon.
Reese’s puffs with almond milk
This bowl was a delight to say the least: its sweet nutty taste is happily married with the crunchy outer coating, delivering a smooth, mellow taste of peanut butter in cereal form. The addition of the almond milk brings out the creamy taste of the ingredients, making this the perfect dish to have on a chilly winter’s morning.
Nut and wheat cocktail surprise
Let’s get straight into it: Shredded wheat, crunchy nut, a combination of assorted nuts and a milk of your choice equals bliss on your tongue and in your stomach. The cocktail (non-alcoholic, of course) blended all of my favourite cereals together to produce a majestic mix of flavours. I would recommend a strawberry milk to accompany this dish to add a fruity twist on a nutty ensemble.
The interview with Gary
If your five year old self could see you now, what would he say?
Oh, I think he would probably have a heart attack (laughs). I can remember being a kid loving cereals – we would go with our mother to the supermarket and be in awe of the cereal aisles, looking back and forth at the different boxes and deciding which one we wanted. If I’d thought then that I would have built my career out of it, and have that same feeling every day when I come in to choose my own breakfast, a heart attack would have definitely occurred.
There are a lot of niche markets to delve into, but why did you choose cereal in particular?
(Laughs) Cereal is eaten by virtually everyone – it’s a meal that is mainly eaten in people’s houses, and for something that is immensely popular, it just seemed crazy that there was nowhere to buy cereal in a café environment. Imagine a world where sandwiches weren’t available outside of Sainsbury’s or the domestic home, it just seemed odd that this hadn’t been thought of before.
How do you acquire the range of cereals available?
We import a lot of our cereals. Most of the ones available are imported from America, we have a lot of British ones, but we do import cereals from Australia, Israel, France and South Africa – there are so many different countries with so many great cereals on offer. It’s great to have access to a lot of cereals that are not available to buy from the average superstore in Britain.
For the purpose of our young, entrepreneurial readers, what would you say was the biggest challenge in setting up your own business?
I would say the start-up – everyone knows the figures are very important, especially how a lot of businesses fail in their first year. A lot of banks don’t like investing in businesses because they are afraid it will fail if the concept isn’t strong enough. We found it hard to find property initially because a lot of the landlords didn’t want to rent to new business owners. We decided to find organisations that help support people in new business ventures. There are loads out there: government funded schemes, private organisations – people that will take a chance on you. We used Virgin start-up, who helped us in terms of business advisers, which gave us a lot of support and helpful advice regarding the café.
How many different milks do you have available?
We have three cows milks, almond, hazelnut, rice, soy, oat, dark chocolate, syrup flavoured milks – we even have a Hershey flavoured syrup that we add to the milk to give it the flavour of the chocolate bar. In all we have over 40 different flavours (laughs) our customers are definitely not short of choice.
Finally, do you think you’ll ever expand – Birmingham needs you!
(Laughs) It could be on the cards in the future, but for now we want to focus on getting this café perfect, then we may look to open other branches.
