Monthly Archives: August 2015

Special: Spooned & Spotted — Froot Loops Bloopers Cereal

image1Welcome to the first installment of “Spooned & Spotted,” a new feature that spotlights submissions from Cerealously readers regarding what tasty or noteworthy cereals they’ve eaten or seen in stores. We almost called it “Spoon-ted,” but that sounds like the kind of euphemism that you’d look up on Urban Dictionary and immediately regret afterwards.

Today’s cereal was spotted by reader Marc P. (thanks, Marc!). It’s Froot Loops Bloopers, and it puts the familiar tropical explosion flavor of the Froot loops you know and love into a much more Crunchberry-esque shape.

Are these meant to be the factory rejects that got caught in the loopification machine, and now Kellogg’s just wants to profit off the runts of the litter?

Is this merely a nefarious conspiracy to make more cereals in shapes that will scrape the roofs of our mouths?

Only Toucan Sam can know for sure. And as he cradles his technicolor Dragon Balls on the front of the box (which have apparently given him the messiah-like ability to walk on a tsunami of milk), we can only assume that he won’t be spilling the beans on that particular secret.

While Froot Loops Bloopers have actually been around since late last year, Marc stumbled upon them for the first time at his local Target while hunting down the new Pumpkin Puffins cereal. It just goes to show you that sometimes the most interesting cereals are hiding right underneath your nose. Keep hunting, cereal seekers, and as Toucan Sam himself always says…

If you’d like to see your picture or thoughts featured on a “Spooned & Spotted” post, click yourself right on over to our submissions page, or just email us at cerealously.net@gmail.com.

News: Kellogg’s Unearths Limited Edition Krave, Froot Loops, and Apple Jacks Cereals for Halloween

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(Images via Kellogg’s Family Rewards)

(EDIT 10/3: My review of Halloween Krave is live! Click here to read it! My review of Halloween Apple Jacks and Froot Loops can be read by clicking here!

It’s all treats and no tricks from Kellogg’s this Halloween season. While General Mills has let their Monster Cereals out of the sarcophagus yet again, and Cap’n Crunch himself is spooking the cereal aisle with Halloween Crunch, the good people at Kellogg’s are firing on all cylinders with three fresh scares of their own.

First up is a jack-o-lantern colored Krave cereal. Unfortunately, the regular cereal shell is merely dyed orange, and there’s no unique pumpkin spice, candy corn, or even sweet potato flavor (okay, maybe that last one was a bit of a stretch). Just the same, milk-guzzling biscuit with that ol’ delicious milk chocolate filling.

I also secretly hoped for yellow dyed filling to mimic the healthy glow of a carved lantern, but this radiant orange is still enough to turn my Hallo-hype meter from “fun-sized” to “king-sized.”

Alongside Krave are new varieties of Froot Loops and Apple Jacks. Both fruity cereals will get marshmallows shaped like the different anatomical sections of a skeleton. This way, you can either build your own full skeleton or simply revel in the cannibalistic joy of chewing on pelvis-shaped sugar bits.

All three cereals come in delightful boxes that paint their respective mascots in dramatized, horror movie-esque styles. The Krave Chocovore is Coming to get you, Barbara, Toucan Sam has spent too long in the Overlook Hotel, and Apple & Cinnamon just stumbled on a house they can easily steal from, since the only person home is Macauley Caulkin. Wait, wrong holiday.

Look for these limited edition boxes in a store near you soon. But don’t wait too long: missing a bowl of these will surely make you howl in disappointment.

Review: Barbara’s Limited Edition Pumpkin Puffins Cereal

IMG_3766Pump-ffins? Puff-kins?

Okay, I’m really glad Barbara’s didn’t try to incorporate cheeky wordplay into the name of their new Pumpkin Puffins cereal, because it’s the kind of pun that looks like it could work, but should probably be outlawed by the U.N.’s International Tribune on Wordplay Sanctions.

Or should I call them the P.U.N.?

But I digress. Sneaking in just ahead of the Autumn harvest is a new pumpkin-flavored cereal from Barbara’s. Like their other Puffins flavors, Barbara’s Pump-ffins take the form of wee little adorable pillows that look like rounded cubes with ridges and bowed-in edges. It’s the kind of complex shape that would make a geometrician sweat just thinking about calculating the surface area to volume ratio.

But luckily we don’t have to calculate any derivatives of pi to cram these hollowed-out cuboids into our hungry pi holes. Continue reading

Special: Cereal Time with Gabe Fonseca — Golden Grahams

♬ Oh those Golden Graha—

We interrupt this catchy jingle for a special Cerealously report! The breaking news has just rolled in that cereal visionary Gabe Fonseca has released the latest in his informative Cereal Time YouTube series, which brings fun facts and history about a different cereal each week directly to to your doorstep. Err…computer screen, I mean.

Throw away those expensive textbooks, kids: this is the last educational reference you’ll ever need.

This week’s bowl is the delightfully flavored and textured Golden Grahams. As Gabe accurately states, Golden Grahams have been underrated for too long, so it’s nice to see them finally get the spotlight. For whatever reason, GG always plays second fiddle to its swirly brother, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which gets all the flavor spin-offs (Peanut Butter Toast Crunch, French Toast Crunch, etc.). Golden Grahams, meanwhile, gets nothing. You lose, Golden Grahams: good day sir!

I, personally, would love to see a s’mores variant of Golden Grahams, or perhaps a seasonal pumpkin spice. But it’s as the saying goes, I guess: always the bridesmaid, Golden Grahams, never the cinnamon-swirled bride.

(Though I will argue that delightfully lick-able ridges trump swirls and powder every time)

As before, enjoy Gabe’s video (how else will you learn about what is perhaps the cutest and most obscure cereal mascot of all time?), and be sure to check out the rest of the Cereal Time series, as well as Gabe’s Twitter profile.

We now return to your previously scheduled jingle.

—ms. Graham cracker tastin’ cereal! ♪

News: Limited Edition Pumpkin Puffins Cereal from Barbara’s to Hit Shelves

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(Image via Barbara’s official Twitter feed)

Are you “pump”ed for Fall? Well thanks to Barbara’s Puffins cereal line, now you have another reason to be!

Though the dog days of summer are still steadily barking, Barbara’s has just announced that they are releasing a pumpkin-flavored variant of their delightful Puffins cereal. But look out, pumpkin spice latte lovers, because Pumpkin Puffins are bringing the real deal. According to Barbara’s website, they will be “made with real pumpkin and only 5g of sugar.”

It’s too soon to say how the inclusion of actual pumpkin will affect the cereal’s taste. But since I’m a massive puffin puffan, as well as a fan of harvest vegetables in general, I can’t wait to give these a try. Perhaps in a makeshift bowl that I’ve made from a hollowed-out gourd.

For those unfamiliar with Puffins, they are “crunchy oat and corn pillows” that come in flavors like peanut butter, cinnamon, honey rice, and more. Barbara’s also produces several other cereal lines, including Snackimals and Morning Oat Crunch, to name just a couple.

The cereal will be available for a limited time only this Fall. It’s unknown yet what stores will carry Pumpkin Puffins, but they are already available to order on Barbara’s online store. Pumpkin Puffins will join the rare pantheon of pumpkin cereals, which now also includes the elusive Pumpkin Spice Mini-Wheats and Trader Joe’s Pumpkin O’s (which have yet to be confirmed for this year).

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to test the milk retention capabilities of hollowed-out gourds.

Review: Frosted Blue Raspberry Pop-Tarts

IMG_3760Lower your pitchforks, everyone!

I know: these new Frosted Blue Raspberry Pop-Tarts aren’t cereal! This is heresy! I should be impeached as editor-in-chief of this site and replaced with a candidate who uses fewer parentheses and unnecessary similes (I use as many parentheses as a mathematician doodling emoticons on his master’s thesis)!

But just hear me out. I’ve previously mentioned my love of Pop-Tarts, and I still stand by it. The way I see it, no other snack better embodies the spirit of cereal quite like Pop-Tarts. They have shiny wrappers that make you giddy just looking at them. Their neon frosting and filling aren’t trying to hide for one second the fact that they’re crammed with enough delicious sugar to make an elephant twitch. And best of all, their addictive flavor practically begs you to mow through a stack of them while marathoning re-runs of Full House.

So if the Pope can be an honorary Harlem Globetrotter, Pop-Tarts can be an honorary breakfast cereal. And hey: maybe they’ll even go all the way again someday. Continue reading

Review: Honey Nut Cheerios Medley Crunch Cereal

IMG_3724Think, Dan. Think.

Think about armed guards. Think about snowy fortresses. Think about architectural impossibilities that couldn’t be understood even by the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page. Okay, it’s no use: I give up.

That was my honest attempt at trying to protect my thoughts from being tampered with again. Like what’s-his-face-who-isn’t-Leo in Inception, I have reason to believe that someone can read my subconscious. And that someone works at General Mills.

See, this review is for the Big G’s intriguing Honey Nut Cheerios Medley Crunch. As I poured my bowl for review purposes and took the inaugural spoonful, I quickly realized that I had eaten a cereal like this before. But this was no cereal you would find on store shelves. No, this cereal—whose doppelgänger I held before me—was a product of my own ideation. Continue reading

News: Count Chocula Beer is “Reanimated” with Help from General Mills

B0LATrYIEAA-TlkI vant to drink your beer!

Was that a Dracula impression, or an impression of someone who has polished off one two many cereal-themed alcoholic beverages?

Straight off of the news of General Mills and Fulton’s Wheaties-themed beer, the Big G is now making sure everyone has a hop-py Halloween, too. Last autumn, Colorado-based Black Bottle Brewery was in the news for slowly bleeding out their hometown’s supply of Count Chocula cereal for use in a Count Chocula-themed beer.

But this year, residents of Fort Collins—Black Bottle Brewery’s base of operations—no longer need to fear that caped hoarders will sneak into supermarkets during the dead of night and suck the cereal aisle dry of its cocoa-marshmallow lifeblood. That’s because, according to the Coloradoan, General Mills has so kindly supplied the brewers with boxes of the Count to use.

The Count’s flavor will be available on tap again at Black Bottle Brewery starting on August 25th. The Count Chocula beer is part of Black Bottle Brewery’s larger line of cereal brews that they have dubbed “Cerealiously.”

Wait, am I reading that right? Something about that name seems…strangely familiar.

So what does the Big G have in store next for cereal+beer tie-ins? One can only guess.

Honey Nut Beer-ios, perhaps?