Well, that’s one way to get me excited about a new cereal again.
Yes, as I sat cloistered in my insular cereal study — a Luddite protesting the breakfast aisle’s newfangled dud bites whilst clinging to his oldfangled Honey Nut Cheerios and Raisin Brans — I felt confident that my crunchy comfort zone would remain an unbustable breakfast bunker.
But then they came: tempting tendrils that smelled of cinnamon and oregano, worming their way through my defenses like thin-crust lockpicks until I couldn’t resist their nonsensical allure any longer. I swung the doors wide open and bellowed to the thrumming metropolis below:
“I simply MUST try Totino’s Pizza-Flavored Cinnamon Toast Crunch!”
It wasn’t easy to acquire, mind you. General Mills only gave away 1,000 of them in a recent sweepstakes, and I didn’t even win one. But thanks to long-time fans of the blog Case & Hannah, who were kind enough to share their spoils, I can give you a full deep-dish deep-dive answer to the question everyone and their Marge Simpson is asking:
I’ll make one thing clear: General Mills wasn’t messing around with these bad Boyardees. This isn’t some gag product designed to make your partygoers scrunch up their faces and run to the nearest two-liter of Diet Mr. Pibb to wash their mouths out.
No, as much as I thought I’d never say this, Totino’s Pizza Toast Crunch….is good.
I don’t really know why it’s good. In my admittedly limited Midwestern palate’s experience, I couldn’t immediately think of anything that I’ve eaten that mixes cinnamon with tomato and spices. Though through some cursory Googling, I discovered that Greek pasta sauce often works cinnamon into the mix to temper the sweet tomato with an earthen spice.
So perhaps that’s the Grecian inspiration for this Toast Crunchian collab — it would honestly make sense, because this cereal (can I even call it that?) is practically a Trojan horse of flavor. See, each bite of Totino’s Pizza Cinnamon Toast Crunch takes you on an odd rollercoaster of flavor. Upon first taste, it just tastes like Cinnamon Toast Crunch, sweet cinnamon sugar, toasted rice, and all.
But then a delayed-release burst of marinara magic blooms across your ‘buds as if delivered by whatever satellite energy ray they used for Havana syndrome. This punchy Papa Johnnian pop packs tomato, onion, garlic, and nebulous Italian Spices (think Pizza Pringles) into a wave of flavor that lasts approximately 0.3 seconds before evaporating out of existence like a passing prophetic vision, leaving the familiar goodness of CTC to return and cleanse your palate like palm leaves erasing footprints in the sand.
It’s weird, it’s unique, it’s fun, and I think the reason it hits just right is because the pizza aspect doesn’t overstay its welcome. In fact, with such stark sensorial walls erected between them through some arcane food science, the pizza and Cinnamon Toast Crunch flavors never really exist in your mouth at the same time, so they never get the chance to meld unpleasantly. Again, I have no idea how they pulled this off, but Totino’s Pizza Cinnamon Toast Crunch makes for a legitimately tasty dry snack that GM could proudly sell on store shelves (if they had any confidence that something with such niche appeal would be anything but a tough sell for the lay-cruncher).
Note how I said “a legitimately tasty dry snack.”
Yeah, as you and the rest of the 8+ billion strong human race likely guessed, Totino’s Pizza Cinnamon Toast Crunch does not work well in milk. Adding the creamy sweetness of milk overcomplicates this already intricate cereal tesseract, upsetting the fragile balance of tastes and sequence-breaking the carefully paced inter-flavor journey like an overeager speedrunner. The hitherto flash-in-the-saucepan pizza flavor oozes into Toast Crunch territory, muddling it into a too-sweet-and-savory mess.
But that’s okay, because I don’t feel like Totino’s Pizza Cinnamon Toast Crunch was ever really intended to be a cereal. Just as Chex has shattered the sweet-cereal–savory-snack ceiling, so too does this bold Italian experiment prove Cinnamon Toast Crunch’s potential as something more than just a vehicle for cloying indulgence.
Would I buy Totino’s Pizza Cinnamon Toast Crunch again if I saw it on shelves? Maybe. But has it convinced me to rethink my cereal-aisle cynicism and start trusting America’s most enterprising minds to elevate the breakfast table again?
Well, also maybe. But for now, I’ll raise a squared slice to ingenuity — and the great exaggeration of cereal’s creative death.
The Bowl: Totino’s Pizza Cinnamon Toast Crunch
The Breakdown: The less said about eating in milk the better, but taking a dry taste of this pie-in-the-sky idea is enough to make you believe in miracles, as it balances its classically sweet and innovatively savory notes with mathematical precision and wizardly wonder.
The Bottom Line: 8.5 Summoning Salt videos about “Milk Skip” out of 10