Families buy more sugary cereal if advertising targets kids, not adults

One of the top sources of added sugar in children’s diets is in their breakfast cereal. A new study shows that advertising drives sales of high-sugar cereals when it’s aimed directly at kids under 12 — but not when it targets adults.

“Cereal companies do have healthy products, but the high-sugar ones are the ones that they actually advertise to kids,” says Jennifer Harris, a senior research adviser at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut.

In the study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Harris and her colleagues looked at all cereals purchased by 77,000 U.S. households over a nine-year period, between 2008 and 2017. They also looked at Nielsen ratings data, which closely monitored all the ads that people in a household saw — both children and adults.

What they found was a strong relationship between how much advertising was targeted to kids and how much sugary cereal that households with children bought. In fact, just nine advertised cereals dominated purchases by these households, and all of them were high in sugar: They had between 9 and 12 grams of sugar — about a tablespoon — per serving.

Brands including Lucky Charms, Honey Nut Cheerios and Froot Loops made up 41% of total household cereal purchases. About one-third of households with kids bought at least one of the nine brands in a given month.

By contrast, Harris says, there was no link to increased purchases when ads targeted adults.

“This study shows that it’s really important for these companies with high-sugar cereals to actually reach kids — that parents probably wouldn’t buy them if their kids weren’t asking them for them,” Harris says.

Public health officials have long been concerned about the marketing of unhealthy foods to kids. That’s why, nearly two decades ago, the food industry launched the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, a voluntary effort to police itself. The 21 participating food companies pledged to cut back on marketing unhealthy foods to children under 12 — later revised to under 13.

But Lindsey Smith Taillie, a food policy researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says these voluntary efforts aren’t making a difference.

“For a long time, we’ve known that junk food marketing to kids was very prevalent in the United States, and it continues to be prevalent despite companies pledging to do better,” she says.

The study is the first to directly link food advertising exposure by children versus adults with subsequent purchases of these foods. Taillie, who was not involved in the research, says the findings offer novel evidence of how food marketing influences what children ask their parents to buy — a concept known as “pester power.”

And this food marketing can also shape children’s long-term preferences for unhealthy products, Taillie says. “We have good data to show that behaviors that are learned in childhood track into adulthood,” which can lead to poor health outcomes over a lifetime.

In a written statement to NPR, Daniel Range, vice president of the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), defended the industry’s efforts. He notes that the study looked only at ads through 2017. He points to a 2024 study showing children’s exposure to cereal ads on TV programming aimed at kids has dropped dramatically.

“Companies’ CFBAI commitments, which apply to both TV and digital media, have driven these reductions in child-directed advertising and changed food advertising to children in a way that is not reflected in the Rudd Center report,” Range said.

Harris was one of the authors of that 2024 study. She says most of that drop in advertising to kids is due to a decline in TV viewing.

Advertisements, like kids’ eyeballs, are moving online, where hyperpersonalization can make it even harder to know what marketing children are being exposed to, Taillie notes.

Edited by Jane Greenhalgh