Charles Rotter
Futurism, in a piece by Frank Landymore that MSN is now syndicating, has solved the mystery of the silent Rice Krispies. The headline reads “Climate Change Has Become So Bad That Rice Krispies Don’t Have Actual Rice in Them Anymore.” The argument behind it, once you strip away the adjectives, goes like this: the weather changed, a recipe changed, therefore climate change did it. That’s the whole case, and every paragraph of the article rests on two things happening at the same time.
Here is how Futurism gets there:
The classic puffed rice foodstuff now no longer contain actual rice grains, at least in UK and European markets, the manufacturer Kellogg’s recently admitted. It will now use rice flour and corn flour, which aside from gustatory concerns, will result in it being noticeably quieter than it used to be. Kellogg’s, in the face of complaints online, insists that retaining the original sound was a “huge focus.”
It’s yet another example of the corporate cost-cutting putrefaction we’ve come to expect — and the reason for it is grim: climate change.
https://futurism.com/science-energy/climate-change-rice-krispies
I’d like readers to notice what just happened in that second paragraph. Mr. Landymore correctly identifies corporate cost-cutting, then decides in the same sentence that the cost-cutting was really caused by the climate. He doesn’t explain how. He doesn’t seem to think he needs to.
His evidence is one line from a Kellogg’s spokesperson:
A spokesperson told media outlets that the reformulation will help “maintain consistent quality at a time when changing weather conditions are affecting the quality and availability of some of the rice and grains used in our cereals.”
The company didn’t get into specifics, but the recipe change comes as a powerful ” super El Niño” climate phenomenon has devastated agriculture in South and Southeast Asia, where more than half the world’s rice is grown.
https://futurism.com/science-energy/climate-change-rice-krispies
“The company didn’t get into specifics, but” is the entire scientific method of this article. Kellogg’s offered a phrase, “changing weather conditions,” that a PR department could have used in any year since farming began. Futurism admits the company gave no specifics, then supplies its own: an El Niño, then climate change behind the El Niño, then a straight line from both to a box of cereal on a shelf in Tesco. “Comes as” is the giveaway. It means “happened around the same time.” That is a correlation, and a loose one, and the article treats it as proof.
If two things happening at the same time is all it takes, Futurism had plenty of other suspects to choose from, and every one of them has more going for it than the weather.
Start with the recipe itself. According to The Grocer, the UK trade paper that broke the story on November 3, the new Rice Krispies use rice flour instead of whole rice, Coco Pops use rice flour and corn flour, and both now contain wheat gluten, so people with a wheat allergy can no longer eat them. The rice didn’t vanish because of a drought, it was ground into flour, stretched with corn and held together with wheat gluten. A company that couldn’t get rice would not be making its cereal out of rice flour. A company that wanted to spend less on rice would do exactly this.
Then there are falling sales. ITV News reported that The Grocer’s Top Products Survey shows Rice Krispies sales down in both value and volume. A brand that is losing sales has a plain reason to cut what it costs to make.
Then there is the new owner. Mars completed its purchase of Kellanova, the maker of Kellogg’s cereals outside North America, on December 11, 2025. It was a $35.9 billion deal, and Mars paid for it with $26 billion in new bonds plus $4 billion in term loans. Eleven months after a company takes on that kind of debt, one of its brands gets a cheaper recipe. I can’t prove those are connected, but I can at least describe how one would lead to the other, which is more than Futurism did for the weather.
And then there is fertilizer. The trade site Sustainable Rice News reports that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz from late February pushed urea above US$850 a tonne in April, just as farmers across South and Southeast Asia were deciding how much to put on their fields. Expensive fertilizer means less fertilizer, and less fertilizer means smaller harvests. That’s a war, not the climate.
Each of these happened at the same time as the recipe change, just like the weather. The difference is that each of them comes with a mechanism you can actually explain. Futurism picked the one suspect it couldn’t connect to anything except by saying “comes as.”
Better still, there is a control group, and Futurism skipped right past it. Kellogg’s cereals in Canada and the U.S. belong to a separate company, WK Kellogg Co, which buys rice in the same world market and lives under the same weather. Its spokesperson told CBC News and Just Food:
“Our Rice Krispies cereals in the US and Canada (e.g., Kellogg’s Rice Krispies, Kellogg’s Cocoa Krispies, Kellogg’s Frosted Krispies) are made with real rice and will continue to be,” a spokesperson for WK Kellogg informed Just Food.
“There are no changes to their ingredients or recipes and consumers can continue to expect the same delicious Rice Krispies taste they know and love.”
https://www.just-food.com/news/kelloggs-removes-rice-grains-from-rice-krispies-coco-pops/
Same planet, same El Niño, same rice market, and whole rice is still in the box in Toronto. If climate change took the rice out of British Rice Krispies, it somehow forgot to do the same thing in Canada. What differs between the two is the company, its owner and its finances, which is exactly where anyone with an interest in causes would look. This was all in the coverage Futurism was summarizing, and none of it made the article.
Now to the rice crop, which Futurism says has been “devastated”:
Asian rice prices have climbed to their highest in almost two years as El Niño has impacted rice production, Bloomberg reported, while the US Department of Agriculture is forecasting a decline in global rice production for the first time in over a decade.
https://futurism.com/science-energy/climate-change-rice-krispies
The USDA does forecast a decline. Its October Rice Outlook puts the 2026/27 world crop at 533.1 million tonnes, down 12.6 million, or 2.3 per cent, from last year. Futurism neglected to say what last year was. It was the largest rice crop in history. Here is the USDA’s record of world rice production since 1960:
In the USDA’s production table, world output was 516.9 million tonnes in 2022/23, 523.6 in 2023/24, 542.2 in 2024/25 and 545.7 in 2025/26. The forecast for this year, 533.1, beats every crop ever grown before 2024.
The “devastated” harvest is the third-biggest rice crop in history.
World stocks are not short either. The same USDA table puts ending stocks at 198.5 million tonnes, which Sustainable Rice News notes would still be the second highest on record. India held 68.8 million tonnes in government stocks on May 1, up from 59.5 million a year earlier. The Asian benchmark, Thai 5 per cent broken rice, was US$465 to US$468 a tonne in early October, and Indian rice was about US$384, up just US$23 from a year before, according to the same report. “Highest in almost two years” means rice costs a bit more than it did when it was cheap.
Since Futurism wants correlation to stand in for causation, let’s give it a correlation worth having. The chart above runs from 1960 to today. Over that time the world warmed, and the world’s rice harvest grew from about 151 million tonnes to 546 million, more than three and a half times as much. If we use Futurism’s method, which is to line up the weather with whatever else changed and call it the cause, then warming has been the best thing that ever happened to rice. Nobody serious argues it that way, because more irrigation, better seed, more fertilizer and more land planted did most of that work. Those are causes with mechanisms, and they are the same kind of thing Futurism ignored when it came to the cereal.
One more problem is timing. A food company doesn’t reformulate two cereals, test them for taste and texture, change the allergen labelling and print new packaging for a continent in a few weeks. Just Food reports the new recipes are rolling out across European markets “in the coming weeks and months.” Work like that was underway well before anyone was forecasting this year’s harvest, which means the effect Futurism describes would have had to come before its cause.
Futurism closes with this:
In the grand scheme of things, a cereal reformulation sounds like a trivial casualty in the face of an unfolding climate crisis. But it’s just one of many more to come.
https://futurism.com/science-energy/climate-change-rice-krispies
I’m sure it is. By this standard every product that gets cheaper, smaller or worse from now on will be a casualty of the climate crisis, as long as the weather changed somewhere in the same year, and it always does.
If changing weather conditions took the rice out of Rice Krispies, why is it still in the box in Canada and the United States?
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Rice production data: USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, PSD Online, grains and pulses data file (October 2026), milled rice production, world total; and World Rice Production, Consumption, and Stocks.
