Go ahead: try and name a type of food that wouldn’t work as an adapted Pop-Tart.

A Pop-Tart Casserole? Ha, you doubt the binding power of sweet potato and marshmallow fluff.

Pop-Tart Steak? Psh, what is a grill but a giant toaster?

Pop-Tart Ravioli? I’m not even going there.

The point is that we probably shouldn’t expect Pop-Tarts’ attempted assimilation of the entire grocery store any time soon. They’ve already got the breakfast game on lock, in their classic form and in these new Pop-Tart Cereals. And their latest pouched, lunchtime snacks are poised to make Mother’s Animal Crackers cry Uncle by February. By this time next year, we’ll be eating Pop-Tarts-flavored Pop-Tarts for post-dinner breakfast. Assuming we left room after that schuh-rumptious Pop-Tarts Bolognese you made, Mrs. G. Seriously, my compliments.

Pop-Tart Bites and Crisps already wowed me, so I’m entering this first-of-the-year review with enthusiastic resolve: to eat more shape-shifting pastries than last year, in more forms than ever before. After all, Pop-Tart Cereal is the post-Internet-killing-the-video-star descendant of Pop-Tarts Crunch, a cereal remembered with near-universal fondness. What could go wrong?

Strawberry Pop-Tarts Cereal Review

Apparently some. Some could go wrong. Let’s start with Strawberry, specifically its tender guts. The filling, despite the stereotypically over-processed reputation of its namesake pastry, contains actual strawberry puree—an especially intriguing inclusion when you consider that Strawberry Krispies didn’t list such an ingredient.

And for the first bite, this potently jellied strawberry flavor is pleasantly lip-smacking: it’s like eating a Fruit Roll-Up made entirely of genuine, flattened-out Strawberry Pop-Tart filling.

But the more you chew any particular spoonful of sprinkled jam canisters, the more gelatinous it gets, becoming a strawberry gummy bear cereal half-through the chew, then finishing somewhere being a gummy bear vitamin and Swedish Fish Oreo innards. It’s a lot of flavor to handle at once, especially when you’ve just eaten a dozen bursting Chibi-Tarts.

I wanted to chastise Pop-Tart Cereal’s shell for being about as flavorful as an iced fortune cookie and being more obstructive of the filling’s flavor than constructive to it. But its potency-dampening sugar blandness may be the only dam keeping Strawberry Pop-Tarts Crunch from hitting my taste buds with candied redness like an Overlook Hotel elevator.

Milk is likewise an important inhibitor and creaminess promoter, but it still leaves Strawberry Pop-Tarts Cereal in an uncanny valley between the two best modern strawberry cereals’ best traits: Strawberry Cheerios’ plump authenticity and Strawberry Toast Crunch’s unsaddled pops of puckering powder. The stuff’s best chance at toothsome glory comes by placing a sizable reservoir of peanut butter at the bottom of ever bowl, to let the filler shell become the white bread to your deconstructed childhood-favorite sandwich.

The Bottom Line: 7 gummy fish hooks out of 10

Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts Cereal Review

Always the cult favorite bridesmaid, less often the corporate go-to sidekick, what Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts lack in commercial star power, they typically make up for in social media acclaim. Despite these underdogmatic tendencies, Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts Cereal is a bit of a lame duck, even compared to Strawberry.

Whereas in Strawberry, the cereal shell is a questionably effective filibuster between mouth and filling, it seems Brown Sugar Cinnamon’s shell has taken over its host and made its plodding plainness the main event. That is to say, “sweet dinner roll” is the primary flavor of Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts Cereal. Despite the tempting glimpses of cinnamon nectar seen through each piece’s pores, the BSC flavor we know from prior pastries is never more than suggested at the tail of every bite. Molasses-tinged cinnamon goodness is always just out of reach, like the cereal’s forever trying and narrowly failing to awaken memories of its previous life as a Cinnabon tray liner.

While the dry experience is ultimately forgettable, adding milk does pull an impressive Free Willy, as liquid liberation allows the promising filling to swim willy-nilly throughout the bowl. It makes the familiar flavor more pronounced, and truly like a slightly better, chewier, and punchier Cinnabon Cereal. If only I had some sort of cereal stripper to hollwo these puppies out and stick ’em to a Golden Graham instead.

The Bottom Line: 7.5 S’Mores Pop-Tart offshoot sects out of 10

This is also the first Pop-Tarts product I can’t recommend freezing. Unless you like the thought of chewing through Santa’s snow-soaked gift bag.

Despite how my reviews may sound, neither Pop-Tart Cereal was particularly bad, just a little disappointing considering the massive hype behind them. I hope this doesn’t discourage Kellogg’s from trying other Pop-Tart flavors, because if we got Chocolate Fudge or Hot Fudge Sundae, a chocolate shell could solve many of Pop-Tart Cereal’s problem—and maybe even be an Oreo O’s killer if we got Cookies & Cream.

I already know Krave is a divisive cereal, so you’ll likely feel similar about these two. Both Pop-Tart Cereals could easily have been called a Limited Edition Krave variant, so I’m going to make a left-field prediction that we see some sort of integration between the brands before 2020. Even if it’s only to turn the two into a not-unthinkable Pop-Tarts Pizza.