What would you do with 9,000 pounds of breakfast cereal? This is the position senior mechanical engineering major Joseph Carey found himself in after browsing Facebook Marketplace and finding a listing for a free pallet of Cocoa Puffs cereal back in 2019. To repurpose the cereal, which was unable to be boxed and sold due to a missing tamper seal, he decided to use it as an opportunity to think about the issue of food waste in America and simultaneously break a world record.

“I love strange opportunities,” said Carey.

Until it was warm enough to complete the project, the Cocoa Puffs were stored and put into lawn bags up until the main event in August of 2020. Due to the pandemic, they were unable to find a public location to set up, so Carey took to his own backyard and set up operations in his parent’s driveway in Glencoe, IL with the help of his MSOE classmate Fahim Mahmood and co-organizer of the event Will Naviaux, a student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

By enlisting the help of 80 volunteers which included several classmates from MSOE, friends and family he was able to turn a dumpster, the only thing large enough to fit everything, into the world’s largest bowl of cereal. In order to qualify for a Guinness World Record, they also had to follow other rules and protocols. For example, they had to rent scales to measure the final weight of the cereal and complete the project in two hours per the Guinness requirements. They also made sure to keep safety a priority, renting a forklift, building a crane, having a mechanical engineering graduate on site as well as two health inspectors.

And what’s a bowl of cereal without milk? The team also had to proportionally add milk to the cereal, using eight to ten food-grade 55 gallon barrels containing powdered milk. They also fashioned the dumpster into a bowl by using tarps and created a circular barrier painted to look like a cereal bowl.

The team not only broke the world record, they shattered with a total weight of 9,045 pounds. This beat the previous record of 3,504 pounds within The Guinness Book of World Records, claiming them the unofficial title of world’s largest bowl of cereal.

After they completed the task, they still had to find a proper way to dispose of all the cereal. Carey wanted to be sure the cereal wouldn’t just sit around in bags in a landfill and was able to find a place where they could compost it when they were finished, eventually turning the Cocoa Puffs into topsoil.

Each year now on their “cocoa-versary” the team tries to get together or at least chat to reminisce about the unique opportunity and what they were able to accomplish together.