Whoa, whoa, easy there, stranger. You new around these parts? It looks like you’ve got some contraband on you: a worrisome burden weighing on your shoulders, and a bellyful of unaddressed anxieties. Here on The Empty Bowl’s Empty Beach of twinkling auburn cinnamon sugar sand, such negativity is not only discouraged, but actively remedied by the beach’s staff. So please, check all your emotional baggage and hoist it into the milky ocean. Where we’re going, you won’t need woes.
Welcome back to The Empty Bowl, a meditative cereal podcast hosted by me and Justin McElroy. In Episode Thirty-Eight, we continue exploring 2020’s bottomless cinnamon cereal selection, talk about an underrated cereal that crept up on us, and give a brief primer on the season’s best autumn cereals.
Still smuggling a few uncertainties in your back pocket? The calming cereal tides keep churning at our Anchor hub, where you can listen to Thirty-Seven and any other episodes. You can also follow along on Twitter, or send in a listener question. We can’t discuss or respond to every email, but each one helps seize sadness from a clamoring beachgoer.
UPDATE: Shortly after posting this, Oatmeal Creme Pies Cereal has been CONFIRMED for a December release by Kellogg’s! No word on Cosmic Brownies yet.
UPDATE 2: Kellogg’s has told me that Cosmic Brownies Cereal “is not launching at this time.” Whether this means it’s been scrapped entirely remains unclear.
Get out of my brain, Big Cereal! Good ideas don’t come ’round too often in this noggin of mine, so I can’t have you siphoning ’em off like a milk-blooded facehugger.
Okay fine, it doesn’t take a particularly ingenious synapse-firing to realize a Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pie Cereal would be a great idea, but given the number of times I’ve referenced the iconic snack cake on this breakfast-centric blog, I at least deserve fringe kudos for keeping the things prominent in our toothsome zeitgeist.
That said, this rumor is an interesting one—it starts with a YouTube video detailing not only a leaked Oatmeal Creme Pies Cereal, but a Cosmic Brownies Cereal, too.
Now, there’s plenty to be skeptical about here. For one, finding evidence of any ongoing relationship between Little Debbie and Kellogg’s is difficult, beyond product recalls from a decade ago claiming Kellogg’s manufactured some snack cracker products for Little Debbie’s parent company McKee Foods. But if Post could cozy up with Hostess, it wouldn’t surprise me to see competitor Kellogg’s seize the chance to partner with the next largest snack cake company. At the same time, with no box art (or rainbow sprinkles!) for Cosmic Brownies Cereal, one could reasonably argue that the cereal pictured is just the similar-looking Cocoa Puffs Brownie Crunch.
But luckily, just this morning I got an inside scoop from a retail worker who saw the UPC for a Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies Cereal in their store’s product order catalogue. They were quick to note, though, that said catalogue also included listings for long-gone releases like Frute Brute and Yummy Mummy, so while all signs point to an imminent release of these two Little Debbie cereals, I can’t confirm them with 100% certainty just yet.
Regardless, my hype is has reached the height of three-to-four dozen double-decker Oatmeal Creme Pies, so I’m going to be reciting silent prayers to goad these leaks into a realized retail birth—especially if the OCP Cereal debuts with a vengeful amount of oat flour. What do you think? Legit or no? Feel free to sound off in the comments below.
In a year that refuses to be read like a book, we’re getting at least one more sweet little twist of cereal-adjacent obscurity.
Starbucks—err, well only Barnes & Noble Café locations that serve Starbucks coffee—is unleashing a new cookie studded with Cinnamon Toast Crunch squares. But don’t expect a pure and chaste cereal milk & cookies experience: as one Redditor has mentioned, this cookie is a triple threat of oatmeal, cinnamon, and chocolate chip. Which, honestly, sounds a lot better. Just as Honey Maid Cinnamon Graham Cereal is basically Toast Crunch with a beefed-up base grain, so too does this cookie sound like Chocolate Toast Crunch if it were made with oat flour.
If you’ve tried this cookie, let me know what you think of it in the comments below. Personally, I’m swearing off Barnes & Noble until the disrespected ghost of Borders Books & Music tells me it’s okay.
