Benefit Cereal Sales Halted; It Didn’t Sell

General Mills Inc. announced that it is pulling from grocery store shelves its Benefit breakfast cereal, a psyllium-based product the company touted as helping to lower cholesterol in a claim that sparked a federal inquiry.

“It was strictly a business decision based on disappointing product performance,” said R. Craig Shulstad, spokesman for the Minnesota-based company.

General Mills said Wednesday that it was halting Benefit after eight months of disappointing sales in test markets.

“We envisioned that with all the interest in cholesterol, a product like Benefit would appeal to a broad range of consumers,” said Shulstad. “What we found was that it appealed to a much narrower range than we had expected.”

General Mills’ marketing strategy and psyllium, which separated Benefit from other cereals promoted for their health benefits, led to a controversy in the food industry about whether the cereal was a drug or a food.

The Food and Drug Administration expressed concern about the amount of psyllium people should consume and called for supporting scientific data.

The cereal contains about 8% by weight of psyllium, a soluble fiber that General Mills claimed had been scientifically shown to reduce cholesterol.

“General Mills brought the downfall of this product on themselves by trying to market the product before it obtained the FDA’s approval as to the safety of psyllium,” said Bruce Silverglade, legal director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer group based in Washington, D.C.

Stephen Carnes, a securities analyst with Piper Jaffray & Hopwood of Minneapolis, said that maybe Benefit was “a product whose time wasn’t right.”

Further, Carnes said, many consumers had said after trying the cereal: It just doesn’t taste good.