A Nation Divided: How Should You Eat Weetabix? Data Has The Answer

These crunchy wheat cakes are a blank breakfast canvas enjoyed by thousands. But how should you eat Weetabix?

The task of finding out how people eat their cereal might seem random but, like many other brands that produce food with customisable toppings, knowing how exactly customers are choosing to consume is is important.

Beyond following people into their homes to examine how meals are prepared (a costly undertaking that may not prove very representative), it’s hard to get real insight into how people prefer to eat their products and thus uncover innovative recipes, favorite techniques and new ways to present the food in stores and marketing materials.

But where else could researchers find insights into how people prepare their food? It’s not like people are inclined to report their cereal preparation techniques online in a way that the researchers, with the correct tools, can easily search to uncover patterns and interesting anomalies.

Oh, wait.

Why Weetabix?

The Brandwatch React team monitored mentions of Weetabix across social media back to the 1st of January.

Applying the powerful tools that come with Brandwatch Analytics to finding out how people like their Weetabix isn’t the weirdest thing we’ve done, and we thought it was an important issue to get to the bottom of.

One thing is absolutely for sure: the dry little wheat cakes can’t be eaten by themselves unless for a dare. But the temperature and accompanying ingredients to Weetabix have been at the center of a fiery debate recently, and we felt it could no longer go unresolved.

Though they are traditionally served with hot or cold milk (we’ll get to that later), the makers of Weetabix have been fueling heated arguments by publishing exotic serving suggestions for the cereal. Some of them haven’t gone down eggcellently.

 

Screaming. This is an actual serving suggestion from Weetabix ? pic.twitter.com/OunlHKjtYv

— James Kavanagh (@JamesKavanagh_) January 11, 2017

In fact, one writer for The Guardian wrote that she nearly choked attempting the “Benedict’s Eggs” recipe.

“Weetabix with ham and eggs” was at the center of a significant spike in mentions of the company on the 11th of January.

The second spike concerned price rises with the lower pound following the EU Referendum vote, with many British brands being affected by recent economic uncertainty.

While we were there, we also took a look at mentions by time of day, finding that mentions saw a predictable spike around breakfast (UK time), though they seemed fairly popular throughout the day, especially around 7pm.

Perhaps surprisingly, male-categorized authors are most vocal about their Weetabix preferences.

Examining the topping options

It seems the debate over how exactly one should prepare the cereal has opened up cracks between households.

Where once cereal preparation was a fairly private affair, social media and our willingness to share our food choices has revealed differences that have startled us.

Lifelong cold-milk-and-Weetabix fans have been flabbergasted by the idea that their next door neighbour could be soiling their cereal with alternative toppings.

Just found out that people put butter on Weetabix and eat it as a snack, who are these people they are wrong in the head

— George Prevett (@PrevettG) January 1, 2017

We broke the mentions of Weetabix down using the serving suggestions published on the Weetabix website at the time of writing.

Using the ingredients provided on the website, as well as a few others we found that were prominent in the Weetabix data, we broke them down into four categories – nuts/seeds, spreads, fruit/veg and berries.

We searched each ingredient within ten words of the word “Weetabix” and counted the mentions that suggested the ingredients were being eaten with Weetabix (filtering out Weetabix products that aren’t usually consumed in a bowl).