The first major broadside against low-carb?

In the news today: Cafes dedicated to breakfast cereal to open across America. You gotta give it to the sugar and carb biz, they're not taking their recent losses sitting on their hands. They've come out swinging hard:

How's this for thinking outside the box: a cafe with jammies-clad servers pouring cereal day and night, topping it off with everything from fruit to malted milk balls, and serving it in "bowls" resembling Chinese takeout containers. It's all cereal. Seriously.

Cereality Cereal Bar & Cafe, which opened its first sit-down cafe Wednesday on the University of Pennsylvania campus, is a sugarcoated - and tongue-in-cheek - homage to what your mother always told you was the most important meal of the day. But she probably never dished out bowls of Froot Loops and Cap'n Crunch topped with Pop Rocks.

Great ploy. If there's anything I miss in my low-carb lifestyle of the last two years, it's cereal! The low-carb versions just don't cut it - too soggy, no crunch.

Cereality was smart to open its first cafe on a college campus, where its student customers are most likely to burn off the carbs and sugar, but I wonder how they will do in other, more adult (and sedentary) locations? Smells like the new Krispy Kreme phenomenon... will Cereality's stock will boom? And will it fizzle in the same manner? It has a chance at sustaining itself, simply because it has more nutritional value than fried donuts.

LINKS: The full story. The Cereality web site.

[Text quote: Copyright 2004 Associated Press; Image: ©2004 Cereality Operators, Inc.]