GENERAL MILLS Going whole grain

General Mills says cereal lovers won't taste the difference.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Cereal maker General Mills, hurt by low-carbohydrate and other fad diets in the past two years, went on the nutrition offensive Thursday and announced that it will make all of its Big G brand cereals from whole-grain flours.
Since 60 percent of its cereals already are whole-grain products, including such company icons as Cheerios, Wheaties, Total and Wheat Chex, the announced plan isn't as sweeping as it might sound.
From now on, however, other popular products such as Trix, Lucky Charms, Golden Grahams and Rice Chex also will be made from flours that contain all the nutrient value of the original grains.
Grain-based foods have been under pressure the past two years as high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets became popular across the nation, touching off concerns among dietitians that consumers were sacrificing the benefits of well-balanced meals in search of quick weight loss.
Tom Johnson, spokesman for Golden Valley-based General Mills, said the company is the largest manufacturer of whole-grain foods in the nation has made whole-grain cereals for 80 years. Those cereal brands now being converted to whole grain were extensively tested with 9,000 consumers across the nation to make sure there wouldn't be any loss of taste.
Liked what they tasted
"We had people say, 'Don't mess with my Rice Chex.' What we found is that our consumers didn't detect a difference or liked the new product better," he said.
So was General Mills' well-orchestrated media campaign Thursday more than an effort to fight fire with fiber?
"Sure, promotion is part of it," said Julie Miller Jones, head of Family, Consumer and Nutritional Sciences at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul. But unlike some diets, she added, "we do know that whole-grain foods are good for you."
Whole-grain foods are defined by cereal chemists as foods made from crushed or milled flours that contain all the parts of the grain kernel. Refined flours will have some of those parts, and have some of their nutrients milled out for taste reasons or baking purposes.