There’s a long history of food marketers trying to get consumers to eat what typically are considered breakfast foods long after the rooster stops crowing. Cereal brands have done it for generations through recipe development, with Rice Krispies expanding eating occasions beyond breakfast with its Rice Krispies Treats recipe introduced in 1940 and Chex hitting it out of the park in 1953 with Chex Mix, a non-breakfast recipe that required purchasing multiple varieties.

In the 1970s, a popular Florida Orange Growers campaign featured celebrities drinking orange juice in the PM and delivering the tagline, “It isn’t just for breakfast anymore.”

In food marketing parlance, it’s expanding a food item’s dayparts. Now Chomps, the brand of self-described “better-for-you” meat sticks, is taking the opposite tack. Although its products are not typically breakfast fare, it is introducing a new flavor for when consumers are waking up to Steve Inskeep: Savory Breakfast.

The breakfast product is among three new chicken flavors, the first chicken products for the 14-year-old brand.

“Our founders have been trying to tackle chicken since the beginning,” Stacey Hartnett, SVP of marketing at Chomps, told Retail Brew. (Editor’s note: No chickens were actually tackled for this story.) “Without getting too technical, it’s very difficult to do, and it’s even more difficult to do without the use of sugar.”

Keep reading here.—AAN

Americans have been getting financially squeezed for a while now, but things aren’t exactly improving.

According to the latest EY consumer sentiment survey, 1 in 4 shoppers said they were financially “worse off” compared to a month ago.

The survey, which included responses from more than 2,000 consumers in December 2025, also found that about 70% cited rising grocery prices as a top concern.

In response, shoppers are making trade-offs. Per EY, 15% of shoppers said they’ve switched personal care brands to cut costs.

Then there are the usual (read: discretionary) suspects such as dining out, travel, entertainment, and apparel—all categories consumers pulled back on.

It seems even higher-income households are tightening their belts. Many are leaning on sales, price comparisons, and private labels to stretch their budgets, a shift that has helped drive interest in budget retailers over higher-end brands.

Keep reading here.—JS

For a few years, it seemed like every company that could create a retail media network would—so much so that retail media outgrew its original moniker and instead became known as commerce media.

Why not try to get a bigger piece of the pie when, per WPP’s 2025 forecast, commerce media could account for nearly a fifth of total ad revenue by 2030?

Last October, Mastercard officially debuted its own offering, Mastercard Commerce Media, joining the ranks of the financial institutions jockeying for some of those ad dollars.

To hear it from Nili Klenoff, executive vice president of Commerce Media at Mastercard, doing so wasn’t simply a matter of getting skin in the game. Instead, the push into commerce media marked an evolution of the company’s existing personalized card-linked offers business.

Keep reading here on Marketing Brew.—KM

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