Breakfast cereal.

Reading the chart. BLS does not publish a retail Average Price series for breakfast cereal — it's a packaged product category where SKU-level variation makes a single dollar-per-pound number meaningless. We use the BLS CPI subindex for breakfast cereal as the single line. From 1978 to 2025 the subindex grew 4.57x — about 7% slower than headline CPI's 4.94x over the same window. Cereal pricing has been studied extensively as an oligopoly market (four firms dominate roughly 80% of the US market) which may help explain the modest above-commodity inflation rate despite the underlying commodity input costs (wheat, corn, oats) staying relatively cheap.