Dallas, 7:41 a.m.
You're on your second Teams call. Half-dressed. Half-awake. Fully starving.
The office has three-day-old muffins and a Keurig that makes coffee taste like disappointment. Your breakfast plan? Pretend caffeine counts as a meal.
Meanwhile, tens of millions of hybrid workers are turning a $20 plastic cup into their morning power move.
Search "cereal on the go" on TikTok. 30 million views. People drinking Froot Loops from dual-chamber cups at their desks like they just discovered fire. CrunchCup went from a 2018 Kickstarter joke to Walmart, Target, and Amazon bestseller status. Portable cereal isn't cute anymore. It's necessary.
The global on-the-go breakfast market? $2.4 billion in 2025, growing 4% annually. That's just the convenience segment—the broader breakfast market is $450+ billion globally.
Here's the kicker: 76% of office workers eat at their desks. 39% habitually skip breakfast. Gen Z has the highest breakfast-skipping rates of any generation—75% of high schoolers don't eat breakfast daily, and that habit follows them to work.
The "sad desk lunch" got a thousand think pieces. The "sad desk breakfast" is a billion-dollar problem hiding in plain sight.
And there's a category-defining business sitting between the cereal aisle and millions of hybrid workers' morning chaos.
The Data That Makes This Real
Let's talk numbers that matter.
Hybrid work isn't going anywhere:
- 50-55% of remote-capable U.S. workers are hybrid (up from 20% pre-pandemic)
- Another 25% are fully remote
- 64% of all workers say hybrid is their preferred model
- That's tens of millions of knowledge workers ping-ponging between home and office
Desk eating is completely normalized:
- 76% of office workers eat lunch at their desks
- 37% of 18-24 year olds eat breakfast at their desks
- 68% actually prefer eating at their desks (convenience beats everything)
Breakfast is broken:
- 46% of workers skip breakfast at least once per week
- 39% habitually skip (3+ days/week)
- Workers who skip breakfast report 14% lower morning productivity
TikTok Shop is eating retail alive:
- Food & beverage category doubled since early 2024
- Platform seeing strong growth with TikTok Shop accounting for 66% of social commerce GMV
- $760 million food & beverage GMV globally
- Major CPG brands (Mars, Coca-Cola) now launching products on TikTok first
The collision: Millions of workers splitting time between home and office, skipping breakfast, eating at desks, and discovering products on TikTok.
From Cereal Cup to Category King
Most people see portable cereal cups and think: "Cute gadget. Maybe $5M business. Nice side hustle."
They would be right. And TBH, no shame in running $5M business. But...
You could also build a desk ritual business for millions of hybrid workers.
The cereal cup is your wedge. A visual, shareable, TikTok-native product that screams "I have my morning together." But it's not the business. It's the customer acquisition device for something bigger.
Vault-only access.
Join founders who spot opportunities ahead of the crowd. Actionable insights. Zero fluff.
“Intelligent, bold, minus the pretense.”
“Like discovering the cheat codes of the startup world.”
“SH is off-Broadway for founders — weird, sharp, and ahead of the curve.”
