Box photos courtesy of Gabe Fonseca
Like it or not, sometimes American breakfast aisles can be an echo chamber of crunches. For every truly novel new cereal flavor we get, there are probably half a dozen or more slight refractions of tried and true favorite flavors: chocolate, peanut butter, strawberry, a perennial genealogy of seasonal variants, and so forth. I get it, it’s low risk, reliable reward business, but sometimes I just want to meet the type of fascinating cereal that will blow my mind and taste buds right out of my head, before picking up my essential organs from the floor, returning them, and politely apologizing like a true cereal gentleman.
And often to do this, we have to look beyond our typical pantry borders.
I was first tipped off about Otees by some cereal fan FB group chatter, and two of the South African cereal brand’s flavors stuck out to me: Bubblegum and Creme Soda. I’d never think to see those flavors on U.S. shelves for like 10 years, given the creeping rate of current innovation, yet Bokomo, a company neither Cereal Time‘s Gabe Fonseca nor I could find much about outside of an old commercial, despite it being South Africa’s biggest cereal producer, has released both. I’m glad Gabe is as interested in these unique flavors as I, because after being sent all 5 Otees boxes for his collection by a kind cereal fan, Gabe generously donated some surplus cereal so we could both give our thoughts on the taste.
So without further exposé or delay, let’s get to chewing for an indefinite length of time (I’m looking at you, Bubblegum).
