Minneapolis’ new crowd-drawing bar Lonely’s offers typical fare such as $18 pitchers of Budweiser. But for the menu at the watering hole, part-owner Eric Odness wanted to include a staple in his home: $7 pizza rolls.

“It was just something kind of simple and fun,” Odness said of General Mills’ Totino’s snacks. “And I think they’re delicious.”

General Mills is striving to make everybody think like Odness — to stay relevant as American diets shift again.

The 160-year-old maker of household staples is facing declining profits and revenue as it struggles to lure shoppers to its marquee brands such as Cheerios, Gushers and Pillsbury dough.

Even a pandemic boost that sent sales higher was short-lived because the company raised prices across its portfolio — a move industry watchers said went on for too long and sent too many of their customers to cheaper products.

General Mills, one of Minnesota’s oldest companies, has not been suffering alone. Most big food makers have had problems keeping up with today’s changing consumer. Grocery shoppers these days are scanning for healthier and bolder options. More importantly, they are feeling unsettled by the economy, scrutinizing their purchases more closely.

The Golden Valley-based company’s stock continues to trade at 15-year lows.

Winning back consumers — who can exhibit “autopilot” behavior — won’t be easy, said Peter McDonald, a former vice president for corporate strategy at General Mills.

“If something dislodges me from my autopilot and puts me onto something else that’s a substitute for what I used to buy ... something’s got to happen to bring me back,” McDonald said. “And lowering the price isn’t enough.”

CEO Jeff Harmening acknowledges that the past couple of years have been “more challenging,” but he has a plan.

The company is now focusing on innovation, capitalizing on trends such as protein and fiber as well as bold flavors. The goal is to make its biggest brands more “remarkable,” a term glued into executives’ vocabulary meant to encapsulate how products impress consumers from their marketing to affordability.

Harmening said the company will keep the consumer “front and center” through the changes.

“General Mills has been around for 160 years, not because we’re unwilling to change, but because we are,” Harmening said in a recent interview. “Our job is to make the years ahead of us return to growth.”

When World War II forced Americans to ration, General Mills distributed more than 7 million copies of the free “Your Share” pamphlet instructing consumers how to stretch every vegetable or piece of meat, senior corporate archivist Natasha Bruns said during a recent interview.

The company has long made it a priority to innovate and “make sure that people are taken care of” throughout some of the difficult moments in American history, she said.

Volatile times occurred again for consumers during the pandemic. But COVID-19 was a financial buoy for big food companies, whose executives had reckoned with slower population growth and more competition in the years prior, said McDonald, who is now a consultant who writes extensively about the food industry.

The lockdown kept consumers from eating out — a trend that had been on the rise, McDonald said. Smaller packaged food companies struggled to meet heightened demand from Americans eating at home, while larger companies with more advanced logistics capabilities such as General Mills were flexible, ready to increase supply.

The period spurred inflation, and food companies responded with “pretty aggressive price advances,” McDonald said.

Take Honey Nut Cheerios: The average paid price across box sizes grew from roughly $4.01 in the middle of 2022 to $4.77 in late 2023 — a 19% increase, according to consumer data firm Attain. The firm tracks the prices shoppers pay, taking into account promotions and discounts.

Consumers boosted by stimulus checks, wage increases and strengthened unemployment benefits could stomach the price hikes for a few years. But food inflation’s slowing was sluggish compared with declines in consumers’ income inflation, and shoppers had enough by General Mills’ fiscal year that ended in summer 2023.

General Mills’ sales increased by 10% that year, even though its sales volumes — representing the amount of product sold — decreased by 4%. This imbalance meant the company had relied heavily on price increases or shrinking product sizes in this last year of revenue growth.

Morningstar analyst Kristoffer Inton said the price increases created a widening price gap between General Mills’ products and cheaper private-label brands owned by major retailers, which control where and how many products land on their shelves. Consumers had caught on.

Lisa Stockert, who runs the “Twin Cities Frugal Mom” blog, does much of her grocery shopping at Aldi, where private labels are king. She said she’ll only reach for a product like Cheerios if it’s on sale, comparably priced to the store-brand products she’d otherwise buy.

“They come from the same places, or at least they seem to,” Stockert said about private-label products. “They taste like they do. So for the most part, no one’s complaining.”

McDonald said General Mills “took too much for too long.”

Higher prices for staples such as cereal sent many consumers to cheaper alternatives. “And if I purchase that private-label cereal, and I get it home, and I don’t really notice a difference, guess what? I’m not going back to the brand,” McDonald said.

The amount of products General Mills sells has declined or remained flat for five years. Profits have suffered as a result, dropping to their lowest annual per-share levels since 2019.

Russ Rubin was previously the head of international consumer research at General Mills before a 2006 departure to work in consulting. He said consumer companies have struggled recently, thought he doesn’t blame them.

“Companies are more profitable with big brands and economies of scale, and that’s a challenge when you’ve got basic consumer behavior fragmenting and moving in multiple directions,” Rubin said.

Some competitors such as Slim Jim-maker Conagra Brands fared even worse than General Mills over the past five years, with steeper stock declines.

On a recent Friday, boba kits and olive oil in plastic squirt bottles marked the pantry aisles of a Minneapolis Target. There was protein everywhere: protein ice cream, “blue razz blast” protein bars, protein sparkling fruit juice and milk chocolate protein candy.

Rubin said some consumers are eating healthier while others are reaching for indulgent foods. GLP-1 drugs for weight loss and the White House’s critique of processed food has further complicated business. Big food companies are struggling to keep up.

“I think they’re trying to catch the tiger by the tail while the tiger is running past,” Rubin said.

Harmening, the CEO, said consumers today are interested in four things: “food that tastes good, food that’s good for them, convenience and value.”

The company has already made changes to attract consumers focused on health and taste. Cheerios Protein, which lists pea protein as the third ingredient, helped the cereal brand grow household penetration for the first time in more than five years, BNP Paribas analysts led by Max Gumport said.

But value is at the top of consumers’ mind, Harmening said. General Mills lowered prices on the majority of its products in the fiscal year that ended in May. The average cost of Honey Nut Cheerios is back down to $4.14, the data firm Attain reported.

“I wish they’d done it sooner,” McDonald said. “My guess is they wish they had done it sooner.”

Asked if General Mills took too long to decrease prices, spokesperson Jessica Stevens said the company knows consumers feel strained and General Mills has “worked to invest in more value for them” over the past year and a half.

“This has translated to lower shelf prices and is resulting in early signs of positive momentum in our business,” Stevens said.

BNP Paribas analysts reported in a note earlier this month that the price reductions in part led the company to grow overall household penetration.

Totino’s had a rough year.

The homegrown brand — Totino’s Italian Kitchen operated for decades just down the street from Lonely’s Bar — is among General Mills’ billion-dollar businesses. Harmening said there are two objectives that make Totino’s effective: “being epic on value and epic on taste.”

“We didn’t do either of them particularly well last year, but we will this coming year,” Harmening said. Totino’s contributed to declining sales after the company tried to switch pizza rolls’ packaging from a bag to a box.

Now, General Mills is trying to fix the product. It already committed to putting pizza rolls back in bags, and the company is focused on “getting that value equation correct for consumers,” Harmening said.

It unveiled on July 16 new garlic parmesan, nacho-flavored and “zesty limón” pizza rolls coated in trendy seasonings.

General Mills does not typically discuss products before they launch, but spokesperson Stevens said innovation is a “company-wide priority for the year ahead.”

Innovation will focus on the company’s best-known brands: It recently launched a Honey Nut Cheerios Protein option and is adding more real fruit into Annie’s fruit snacks. It will also focus on pet food, with launches like a new gravy offering on its wet cat food line.

In this fiscal year, the company will launch twice as many health-focused products as it did two years ago, and it expects to grow its “affordable protein” portfolio by about 40%, Stevens continued.

Wall Street analysts are cautiously hopeful about General Mills’ turnaround plan. Gumport said in a note that General Mills “is taking the right actions,” but added that he hopes that changes “are remarkable enough to drive improvement in the company’s financials.”

Inton said when macroeconomic consumer sentiment challenges becomes too dire, “no matter how good you were doing at innovation, you can’t swim against too strong of a current and expect to go anywhere.” The analyst said he doesn’t think the company has reached the bottom yet.

“Are we nearing it?” Inton asked. “That’s probably the more appropriate question, and I still can’t answer that.”

©2026 The Minnesota Star Tribune. Visit at startribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.