General Mills Cereal Adventure Opens in Minneapolis
After working with PCL Construction, Shea Architects and General Mills for almost a year, General Mills’ Cereal Adventure opened to great fanfare in June at Minnesota’s Mall of America.

Project Manager John Beckman managed CSSI’s portion of the experience, including the Farm to Factory display and with the Make Your Own Cereal activity center.

The Farm to Factory display, Cereal Adventures’ primary attraction, is an interactive and fun experience in which kids walk through a factory and learn how cereal is made. The attraction consists of several different areas each of which has its own exciting activities.

The Farm and Mill Area consists mostly of graphics that explain the process of how cereal is made. From there, guests go into a Control Room where the cereal-making process is reiterated on the animated control panel and TV screens at each of five stations. Guests can spin wheels, ride bikes, and pull levers to the dough, and fire up a huge oven in the Cooking Room. The spinning and churning dough can be seen as guests travel through the giant mixing oven, then slide down into the Dough Extruder. The Dough Extruder has a pair of giant red boxing gloves that punch the dough down and then send it to be shaped into a familiar looking cereal. The Puffing and Toasting Area is where guests can puff up newly formed cereal by pumping up the Cheerio Volcano, causing it to explode with giant Cheerios. In the Toasting Area, guests can toast the cereal by blasting it with hot air as it moves along a vibrating conveyer belt into the Finishing Area where the cereal is packaged into colorful boxes, gets its special secret ingredient, a brand identity, and has its freshness sealed in. It is then launched up into the store.

The Make Your Own Cereal display lets kids decorate a cereal box, name it, and then create a customized mix of cereal that they take home with them. After the child makes their cereal choices, a conveyer belt takes the freshly decorated boxes to giant silos that appear to store and churn out cereal. The boxes are later filled and purchased by their creator as they exit the attraction.

CSSI staff, including Joel Gordon, Joe Strange, Curt Kucik, Dave Duwell and Andy Lemerand, spent over two months in Minnesota installing this exciting new family entertainment center.

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