I think the bigger question is why do cereals come in boxes at all?
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
40 points (95.5% liked)
No Stupid Questions
47927 readers
730 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The cereals I buy don’t.
The boxes are really there to claim space on the shelf. They’re 100% marketing budget.
They also provide a protective layer that helps prevent the cereal from getting crushed. Potato chips do the same thing by adding a lot of air to the bag
So do cereal bags.
Couldn't find the jar in time.
You can't make a cereal box fortress out of bags
Also can't keep it in a cabinet without it taking a lot of horizontal space
Lays is trialling then in the Netherlands at the moment and people are unhappy with chips going from €12/kilo to €20/kilo
https://www.jumbo.com/producten/lay-s-bugles-nacho-cheese-chips-snackbox-135g-711678STK
I love the idea of chips in that quantity, makes people (inckuding myaelf) more responsible with their diet
Your cereal bags are recyclable? They aren't also in cardboard boxes?
Cardboard box (normal recyclable) holding a plastic bag (can drop off at store if clean and dry).
Drop off at what store? In what country?
Yeah, reading this comment section as a German is mind boggling. You have to bring your food packaging back to the store you bought it from to get it recycled? We just have a separate recycling bin (and a separate paper bin and an organic waste bin) at home that gets picked up by the municipality
The only thing we have to bring back to the store are empty bottles to get the deposit back
You have to bring the glass (non Pfand anyway) to the glass container, no? I always find it a bit odd that they don't pick that up.
There are different glass bottles, some are multiple use (water and beer bottles), which you have to pay a deposit for and bring back to the store so they get washed and reused. And others are single use (wine bottles) which you don't pay a deposit for, and they have to be brought to glass containers (different containers for different glass colors), those don't get washed and instead get molten down to make new bottles
Plastic bottles always have a deposit and depending on the bottle either get washed and reused, or molten down. Aluminium cans also cost a deposit and have to be brought back to the store
Right? I couldn’t get any retailer in the Los Angeles, CA (USA) area to accept shopping bags, forget cereal bags. Happy that the state sued the shit out of them then banned plastic bags though: it always sucked when I’d forget my bag and I’d have to pay for that thick-ass plastic shit.
I do still struggle with plastic bags in packaging still though because my waste management company doesn’t accept them.
The Store™
These? :
You might call them crisps.
The heat would cause loads of condensation and ruin the lot
What heat does cereal go through that chips don't? And how would it contribute to condensation in one case but not the other?
Chips are usually served hot
With cheese on top.... Yummy.
I'm not familiar with cereal bags being accepted for recycling at grocery stores -- although I'm aware that grocery store recycling in California has deep issues regarding implementation -- but regarding why a chip bag is different than a cereal bag, my guess is that it has to do with the former being air tight.
Chip bags are intentionally filled with gas (usually nitrogen) in order to preserve the contents for a long shelf life. Rather conveniently, this also helps the chips not smash up against other chip bags in the same box, at the cost of fitting fewer bags into a shipping container. As such, chip bags have to be air tight, and mylar is good at that, as evidenced by mylar balloons that keep helium inside for far longer than a latex balloon (to the sadness of every electricity provider on Earth).
Whereas I suspect the clear plastic -- maybe polyethylene? -- bags used for cereal have different requirements, because a cereal box already provides mechanical protection against other boxes, and an expectation that cereals (a bona fide breakfast foodstuff, compared to chips which have always been categorized as a snack food) will be eaten in quantities that make recyclability a priority; this is a guess.
I also think cereals might historically have been just free-floating inside the box, in the same way that dishwasher power detergent is still packaged within a thick cardstock box, with a pour-out metal spout. That said, this citation seems to indicate that cereal bags are in-fact liners, which would suggest the primary reason is one of food safety, if contact directly with the inside of the box would be a problem.
And this kinda makes sense to me, since nobody would want to eat soggy cereal if a bit of rainwater seeped through the box and contacted the food.