What Is the Best Way to Measure the Color of Cereal?

Step inside any grocery store, and you're met with an entire aisle dedicated to cereal and cereal-based products. As a cereal manufacturer or distributor, you face significant competition. That means every aspect of your product must perform at its highest level, delivering a fresh and appealing option that will make buyers deviate from their go-tos.

Aside from the fun mascots and health claims, what makes people choose one brand over another? Appearance! Make sure every batch of your cereal looks its best by understanding the importance of color measurement and how you can gauge cereal color with the best equipment from HunterLab.

Factors in Cereal Color

Most cereals are a mix of similar ingredients, marketed in ways that make them unique and exciting. That's why it's so important to have a set brand identity and cereal appearance. You have to understand how your ingredients will interact with one another to deliver a uniform look. Consider:

• Cereal base: Corn, wheat, and oat are the most common cereal bases. If you decide to add color to these materials, understand that their base color will affect any colorant you use and may result in a different outcome than intended.
• Added ingredients: Most cereals have more than one note, whether it be a powdered sugar coating, bits of fruit and nuts, or something fun like marshmallows or chocolate. The longer these ingredients stay in contact with the cereal base, the more likely both are to have their colors rub off on each other. When measuring the color of cereal, be sure to consider this in your experiments to anticipate how your careful color options may change.

Find Color Measurement Solutions at HunterLab

Whether your cereal is as plain as possible or you're adding everything you can, color measurement will help build trust between you and the consumer. Cereal color measurement ensures consistency, safety, and freshness, showing your buyers that you take care to produce the results they love every time. At HunterLab, we've helped cereal manufacturers like you make this happen with Aeros, one of our benchtop spectrophotometers.

Aeros was designed with non-uniform foods like cereal in mind. It measures samples in seconds and delivers results using common color scales and indices for you to record and compare with later samples. Keep all your data in one central place and streamline your measurement processes by requesting a quote for the Aeros from HunterLab today.