Serious question: at what point does a ‘new’ cereal just become breakfast trail mix?

Not trying to knock General Mills before trying their newest cereal, of course, but the latest and second-laziest trend of new cereal ideation (behind crude ‘mallowfication, of course) seems to be creating Greatest Hits collections of other cereals so it can be called something distinctly new. Post has done it, and Kellogg’s does it every day at their cereal café.

Whether it’s collaging or crate-digging, sampling is surely a treasured technique of assemblage. But would people rather have a pastiche of cereals past, or an actual Trail Mix Cereal with roasted peanut flakes, nutty raisins (a la Raisin Nut Bran), and chocolate morsels?

(Sorry for the specificity; I’ve been contemplating pouring milk in my 10-pound bag of Sweet & Salty Mix all week.)

For better or worse, General Mills’ new pair of Drumstick Cereals tweak the past to create an ice cream of the future (no, not that one). Launching in both Classic Vanilla and Mint Chocolate, each pairs Golden Grahams and Cocoa Puffs with newly flavored disk pieces familiar from Cookie Crisp. Turns out I had mixed feelings. To pre-conclude, as much as the back of the box tries to bamboozle us with fancy new piece names, I can’t help but wish this cereal was a cerealverse crossover instead of something Drumstick branded.

Can’t you picture Sonny the Cuckoo and Chip the Wolf surfing on Golden Graham pieces across a honeyed sea?

Classic Vanilla Drumstick Cereal Review

I have to start with Vanilla—not because it’s Classic, but because it’s completely outclassed by its more evergreen sibling.

For starters, the Totally Not Golden Graham pieces and I Can’t Believe They’re Not Cocoa Puffs taste largely how you’d expect them to, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. I have a bit of beef with Cocoa Puffs for billing itself as the most chocolaty General Mills cereal, when the chocolate bits in both GM’s choco-PB cereals blow them out of the milk with a thicker and pillow-ier sugar dusting.

This means their presence in Drumstick Cereal has a flat, arid mouthfeel and a dull cocoa sweetness that isn’t complemented by the other pieces, which have the exact same texture and mouth-drying mouthfeel. Don’t eat this cereal dry without a glass of milk, Gatorade or melted Popsicle on hand, or your palate will soon be annexed into the Sahara.

Speaking of those other pieces, perhaps it’s my mind’s eye, but the cone pieces seem to lack a lot of the honey goodness Golden Grahams is known for, making them taste sort of like toasted sugar cone with a dash of pizzelle cookie. It’s not quite the waffle cone flavor promised by the box, but it’s still better than those dreaded disks, which contribute nothing to the cereal’s overall taste profile. Instead, they dilute it with an imperceptible trickle of vanilla. Vanilla in cereal has always been vaguely defined—often I feel like I’m imagining it more than tasting it—and in Classic Vanilla Drumstick Cereal I get nothing but “Unseasoned Nilla Wafer.”

Eaten as one (and absolutely with milk, to give it some sort of chilly creamed support), it just tastes like Diet Honey Maid S’Mores Cereal, as it replaces the sweet lil marbits with big honkin’ flavo-voids. Much like how there’s no reason not to evolve your Metapod into a Butterfree, I can’t see myself ever pressing B to hold my taste buds back with a cereal so nutritionally similar to superior versions of the same execution.

Unless, of course, there’s an Everstone as a prize at the bottom of this box.

The Bottom Line: 4.5 Fool’s Golden Grahams out of 10

Mint Chocolate Drumstick Cereal Review

Have we all forgotten Classic Vanilla exists by now? Good. Let’s start fresh (literally) with something more interesting.

The cone and cocoa pieces taste similar to some other ice cream cereal I can’t seem to remember…but this time, they’re joined by actually flavored disks—cereal rounds that are also charmingly colored somewhere on the green continuum between Nickelodeon Slime and Squidwardian flesh.

Wintergreen marks may recall General Mills’ previous foray into mint chocolate, Thin Mints Cereal. A solid all-in-one fudgy mint cookie solution with an avalanched co-coating to boot, Thin Mints Cereal still reigns in mint condition within discontinuation purgatory, as the disparate spread of this Drumstick Cereal’s namesake flavors fail to pack as potent of a punch. The mint disks try their hardest to infuse the sweet mint of real mint ice cream into every bite, with mixed results; it is a great, Shamrock Shaky mint, but these notes still end up accenting the whole bowl rather than directing it. In this case, it’s actually the cone pieces that do a disservice to the others. Were they all to be removed (and replaced with, say, Cookies & Creme Fillows), the whole thing would taste a lot more cohesively delightful.

But none of this is to say that Mint Chocolate Drumstick Cereal isn’t good. This is a peak dry-shovel-by-the-handful cereal that’ll have you doing a thousand-calorie stare into your pantry, and with milk it’s able to better wrangle its many undertones into an overall pleasant experience, even if history likely won’t be kind to it. Though of course, if you do have some trail mix on hand, you can make it unforgettable:

The Bottom Line: 7 Patrick Star Pantone swatches out of 10