#MakeoverMonday Week 12 2021: The Cereal Industry Had a Very Weird Year

I enjoy random topics like the one Andy picked for this week: What did 2020 look like for the cereal industry and what does the data suggest about our cereal consumption habits? (or at least those of people in the US?

Here is the original visualization, published on bloomberg.com:

What works well:

• A catchy title that makes me curious to find out more.

• Nice simple colors.

• Easy to read and understand legends. I like that the y-axis has its legend on the right, where most of the data is.

What could be improved:

• The actual ‘unusual’ change for 2020 is very hard to see because the black bars are so narrow compared to the rest of the data.

• While the title makes me curious, there is no explanation of what exactly is unusual here. Sure, it might seem obvious, but we can never assume that our audience/readers know what we mean with cryptic titles. Best to point it out.

• There’s no real story. Succinct titles and subtitles are nice, but a bit more of a description would go a long way here.

What I did:

• The story that stood out to me in the data was of course the spike in consumption of various foods and beverages in March 2020.

• But the real question is why. We don’t eat and drink more because we’re in lockdown. No, it’s because we panic-buy and we hoard in case the shelves are empty.

• So that became my focus.

click on the image for the interactive version