As essential foods in many cultures’ diets, cereals collectively account for about half of global caloric intake. The world’s food supply relies on a small number of species, including rye, oats, barley, sorghum, rice, wheat, and maize, because they are all members of the same family. This poses a risk to global food safety, given the extreme weather conditions caused by climate change and/or geopolitical conflicts. Therefore, improving both nutritional characteristics and those that enable them to survive increasingly adverse weather conditions through technologies such as CRISPR-Cas gene editing is essential. The components of the CRISPR-Cas system allow genes to be edited specifically to silence or overexpress them, without the need to introduce genetic material other than that belonging to the cereal in question. This, in turn, could improve consumer acceptance and facilitate the procedures that different countries’ regulations impose on genetically modified products. This technique has already been used to fortify cereals that are deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids, for example, by editing the genes (overexpression of proteins) that code for a metabolic pathway that synthesizes them, thereby increasing their content. Similarly, genes have been edited so that cereals capture and retain more minerals such as zinc and iron. Likewise, editing with CRISPR-Cas has made it possible to reduce cultivation times, plant size, and productivity, as well as to improve their organoleptic and cooking characteristics, ensuring greater production and increased cereal reserves. In turn, it has been possible to generate cereals capable of resisting abiotic factors such as drought, heat, and salinity, among others, and to resist biotic factors such as diseases caused by microorganisms. Finally, editing cereal genomes without inserting exogenous genes poses a lower biosafety risk than other techniques and could be more morally acceptable than their genetically modified counterparts.