How Are Cereals Made? From Field to Bowl

Ever wondered where our cereals come from? Ever heard about whole grains? Find out why and how we keep them whole from the field to your breakfast table.

What’s the point of stripping away all the nutrients of whole grain, especially if they constitute an important part of a balanced diet for your family? By keeping all the parts of the grain, Nestlé Breakfast Cereals make sure to optimize the nutrient content provided by the grain itself. To find out more about what makes a balanced breakfast and understand all the natural wonders of the whole grain ingredients, click below.

Whole grain every step of the process

From the golden field to your breakfast table, grains are harvested and milled into whole grain flour. Then they are mixed with other ingredients like sugar, natural flavours (such as cocoa or honey flavour), water, vitamins and minerals, antioxydants to make the dough. Finally, we bake them. So you can see it takes a lot of care to transform whole grains into cereal, but it’s worth the effort. This makes it easier for you to enjoy whole grain cereals as part of a balanced breakfast, our processes & recipes ensure we provide nutritious cereals with B vitamins and minerals. And helps us make such tasty breakfast cereal!

How to Make Cereals – in four simple steps!

We want our breakfast cereals to be tasty when they reach your breakfast table. So we rely on simplicity when we make them and try to keep things in our factories as homely as possible - actually, the way we bake is not a whole lot different from the way you bake. There's nothing complicated and fancy about making breakfast cereal, you could even make it at home! Read on for a healthy breakfast recipe you can make for yourself and the family.

MILLING

FROM GOLDEN GRAIN TO WHOLE GRAIN FLOUR

When the grain has been ripened by sunshine, harvested and then cleaned, it's brought to our factory. At most of our factories, we (mostly) mill it ourselves, as this cuts the time between the grinding of the grain and the finished product (about two hours!), so the flour is really fresh. And by doing our own milling, we only produce as much whole grain flour as we need - so no waste!

How would you do it at home?

Well, you probably wouldn't grind the grain yourself - unless you live in a windmill! But the whole grain flour you use for your baking is going to be pretty similar to what we're using - only ours will usually be fresher. That’s because, where we mill it ourselves, it goes straight from the mill into the mixer.

COOKING

MIX IT UP, THEN TURN UP THE HEAT!

Before the milled grains are cooked, we mix the flour with water and other ingredients, including the vitamins and minerals we add, and cook the mix into a dough vacuum blender to create a dough. (If we're going to coat the finished product later on, we keep back a few additional ingredients like chocolate or cocoa powder.)

How would you do it at home?

This is the whisking, mixing, beating part of the home baking process. That bit where you throw all the ingredients into a bowl and put in some serious elbow grease! If you're baking bread, it's where you knead that gloopy goo into a soft, supple dough (or save yourself the hard work and toss it all into the breadmaker. Whatever would grandma say?!).

SHAPING

CREATING THOSE COOKIES AND CLUSTERS

Then the dough goes through one of our special machines - think pasta press or sausage maker - to create the cereal shapes you know and love: hoops, balls, flakes, cookies and clusters. And did you know? SHREDDED WHEAT is made by literally shredding the wheat using rollers with grooves on!

How would you do it at home?

When you get out the cookie cutters to make your favourite biscuits or gingerbread people, you're shaping your dough, just like we do.

BAKING

CRISPY CEREAL FRESH OUT OF THE OVEN

Finally, we put the cereal shapes into one of our large ovens where they're toasted for just the right amount of time. Imagine a huge, very hot tumble dryer, except this one doesn't dry your socks - it gives your cereal a lovely golden colour and crisp crunch. When they're done, we let them cool (some of them get a final coating of flavour, like a touch of chocolate coating, mmmm!), then we pack them up and ship them off to the shops.

Job done.

How would you do it at home?

This is the "pop-your-cakes-into-a-preheated-oven-for-40-minutes" bit. We've just got a bigger oven.

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