Oreo O’rnithology: the academic study of Earth’s diverse and varied flocks of cookies & cream cereals.
This field of research has only recently exploded in popularity. After the first Oreo O extinction around the turn of the millennium, budding scientists found themselves sandwiched somewhere between cereal paleontology and purgatory. Despite the ever-feeding buzz that demanded Oreo O’s’ reinstitution, it wasn’t until 2013’s false flag release of General Mills’ ghastly Hershey’s Cookies & Crème Cereal that interest in the subject—and the prophesied birth of a new C&C prodigy—began to bloom anew.
From there, creams and dreams came true quite rapidly. The world discovered South Korea’s worst kept and best tasted secret. Malt-O-Meal dropped a suspicious Oreo O’s taste alike. Then we finally got the real stuff back, albeit with a milked-down flavor that only soured with the tepid release of Golden and Mega Stuf variants. Now, mass investment in the category seems to be approaching critical mass. We’ve had a promising yet poorly executed cookies & cream cereal. One that hits your gut like a fossilized Hydrox cookie. And now, I’ve unearthed an unsuspecting store brand interpretation from Millville—in hopes that it will satisfy the authentic Oreo O’s cravings that only expensive Eastern hemisphere exports can currently satisfy.
Now, I’ve learned that Millville Cookies & Cream Cereal is by no means new—readers claim the stuff, along with its Golden variant, have been out for anywhere from 2 to 12 months. But as someone who makes few pilgrimages out to Aldi without good reason, I was hitherto ignorant, plodding along on the dark side of the moonpie while generic Oreo O’s bred like space bacteria somewhere in Aldi’s cardboard jungle of discount groceries.
But that ends today: I will make my penance with the cosmic Oreo O’verlords—and find out if there’s a new cookies & cream (dun)king in town.
Well…good thing I wrote a 300-word intro, because I don’t know if I could stomach to give Millville Cookies & Cream Cereal over 300 more.
Let’s make one thing clear: spherical cookies & cream cereals notwithstanding, this is the worst cereal tribute to Oreo Cookies I’ve yet to try. To this you might say, “What did you expect from a bargain-barrel store brand?” And while I admit the box’s chintzy rendering of the cereal never held my hopes too high, I saw two pearly silver linings: one, Millville has been killing it lately, and two, Malt-O-Meal (owned by Post, who owns Millville)’s Cookies & Cream cereal was arguably better than the official Oreo O’s on shelves now—so I expected this to be essentially the same cereal.
But if you look at the above photo and compare it to any Oreo O’s or Fauxreo O’s, you’ll notice a crucial difference: Millville Cookies & Cream Cereal is sprinkless! I haven’t seen this sort of confectionary criminality since the French started cutting costs with plain ol’ pareils.
Sure, the individual rings are cocoa flavored with an allegedly creamy glaze, but the heart and soul of Oreo O’s is missing. Whether it’s specifically the sprinkles that contain the beloved cereal’s horcruxed life force, or whether it’s some intangible and difficult to distill aura is unknown, but what’s clear is just how half-baked these cookies really are.
The corn base of Millville Cookies & Cream Cereal immediately undercuts whatever flavorful value the rest of the taste notes may have had to offer. Atop this mountain of brittle maize lies no appealing apex: the cocoa (butterless) powder baked into each ring is pretty bland, while the creamy glaze is somehow worse than simply cloying. This is a zero-note sweetness that nevertheless invites in a vampiric aftertaste that drains away appetite with its chemically fake vanilla sheen.
Not only do I expect better from Millville, but I demand to know where they’re hiding all the sprinkles. I bet they’re all in a silver chalice somewhere, boiled into a regal slurry to be consumed solely by one Alan Di himself. When will that cup runneth over? Where is this trickle-down Oreoconomics I’ve heard so much about?
It certainly isn’t in a milky bowl of Millville Cookies & Cream Cereal. The most remarkable thing about dousing these dour hoops is just how quickly their color changes from “skeletal tree bark” to “a brown so glossy it’s impossible for my camera to properly white balance.” The taste, or lack thereof, doesn’t evolve much. Milk may dull the corn base’s starchy aggression, but it also whisks away any chocolate appeal whilst simultaneously polluting dairy purity with whatever vanilla veneer they gummed this stuff up with.
In short (I’ve already given these a few hundred words too many), even if you want Oreo O’s on a budget, seek out Malt-O-Meal’s interpretation instead. With a chocolate flavor this toothless, I can scarcely imagine just how boring the Golden variant must be.
If nothing else, I suppose we can congratulate Millville for finally clarifying the identity of milk’s least favorite cookie.
The Bowl: Millville Cookies & Cream Cereal
The Breakdown: Corny, medicinal and sabotaged by its scarcity of sprinkles, even a splash of cocoa can’t redeem Millville’s b-movie rendition of Oreo O’s.
The Bottom Line: 3 creamy ivory towers out of 10