Finally, a Pebbles product for guys like me who detest the low-density, appetite-exacerbating composition of the cereals themselves. No longer will I have to eat three bowls of Fruity Pebbles just to feel them in my stomach: now I can insert a whole creamy bar of the stuff into my mouth like a Super Nintendo cartridge and call it a day.
Thanks to Candy Hunting and @andyjarnold, we now know that these King Size Fruity Pebbles Candy Bars are already available at Walmart: the appropriately King-Sized retailer that tends to reign over new cereal-adjacent exclusives. It’s unclear from this photo alone whether the Pebble-paved bar is made of white chocolate or just some cheap, abstract white sugar confection, but eagle-eyed, rabbit-eared readers may remember that Frankford also released a Froot Loops White Chocolate Easter Bunny earlier this year, so it seems they just swapped one fruity cereal brand for another here.
Wait a minute—hey Frankford, if you have leeway to partner with any cereal company, why wouldn’t you make a White Chocolate Trix Bunny?
Stressed? During this week of all weeks? Well color me surprised. I think surprise is an ethereal pink, right?
Either way, kiss your worries goodnight, goodbye, and good riddance, because Justin and I are back with the Thirty-Ninth episode of The Empty Bowl: a meditative podcast about cereal. And if you doubt we have the career experience in psycho–cereal sleep therapy, just know this is technically our second anniversary episode.
In this milestone of an episode, we get retrospective with General Mills, reveal the secret ingredient in Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies, and challenge you to provide any evidence that GranolaSnacks really existed, or if I somehow tasted and photographed a lucid dream.
Is this week still weathering you? We’ve got a lot more rosy-eyed 30-minute dreamscapes at our Anchor hub. 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 colors me a deeper shade of surprised.
That’s it, folks: I’m officially out of my element and not properly certified to dissect this news piece. It just feels like, after so many recentmutationswithin the Toast Crunch family—which is really more like a genus at this point—Toast Crunchology has become a discipline so complicated it requires a college degree to fully grasp the ecological, gastronomical, and heck, cosmological significance of Chocolate Churro Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
Of course, the humorless reality is that this Chocolate Churro Toast Crunch is far from revolutionary. Just as regular Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros tasted nearly identical to their square relatives, so too will Chocolate Churro Cinnamon Toast Crunch most likely adapt Chocolate Toast Crunch in a more tubular, crunchy, and palate-lancing shape.
Despite its not-too-surprising existence—a convenient clap-back to Chocolatey Churro Pop-Tarts, perhaps?—Chocolate Churro Toast Crunch is probably going to be pretty good, because Chocolate Toast Crunch and Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros are also, well, pretty good. Congratulations, young Choco—Cinna Churros: you are the apples of both parents’ eyes.
December 2020: The Toast Crunch Dynasty’s Last Stand. As the snow piles around the old cathedral and the rabid Teddy Grahams—prematurely upset from their winter slumber—keep pouring through the crunched-open stained glass windows. What few Crazy Squares remain regret cannibalizing their Churro & French Toast comrades. They sharpen their sugar cookie shurikens and prepare to defend their cereal’s legacy. Cinnamon Toast Crunch? An irrelevant cereal? Over their soggy bodies.
I over-exaggerate, of course: Cinnamon Toast Crunch is one of the most popular cereals ever, and such acclaim is unlikely to dissipate any time soon. But between Honey Maid Cinnamon Graham Crunch and Malt-O-Meal ChurrO’s, Post has proven how much better Cinnamon Toast Crunch could be if it really applied itself. Despite this, Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch as of yet has no equal, let alone a superior. For the time being, the annual return of Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch is worth celebrating.
The stuff isn’t all that flavorfully complicated—it’s doughy and buttery, yet still lightly cinnamon’d and heavily sugared. According to General Mills, SCTC is already shipping to stores, so once you get over the cross-temporal discomfort of seeing holiday cereals next to Halloween ones, I encourage you to pick up enough boxes to catapult from a second-story window at trick-or-treaters. Continue reading →
Six months. Cereal makers have had six months of quarantine to hunker down, cut through the corporate B.S. and dream up something legendary for the breakfast industry, yet I have to admit, their current efforts feel half-baked—and more than a little stale.
Don’t get me wrong, as someone who’s been rallying for retro reversion since he started writing about cereal, I don’t want to sound ungrateful. General Mills’ just-announced “Ultimate Taste Comeback” could be a harbinger of great things to come, but two truths stand out: one, the improved cereals appearing above seem like weak initial efforts, and two, the view of celebrating cereal’s nostalgia would’ve been really hot and timely five years ago. It is the opinion of this cereal scholar that cereal as a nostalgic symbol or vehicle was once so obvious of an idea that it’s become a bit clichéd. Now that The Empty Bowl has made such a splash in the field of breakfast meditation, I presently like to supplement any corporate-driven nostalgic retrovision with an eye for what the individual can constructively make out of their own cereal experience.
But I mindfully and mindlessly digress. Let’s assess General Mills’ Ultimate Taste Comeback lineup:
Trix will feature six fruity shapes again! Wait, wait…they’ve done exactly this for the past two years. So, not exactly a comeback as much as a box art refresh.
Cocoa Puffs will have “more chocolatey taste!” This is exactly the kind of vague promise that irks me about The Ultimate Taste Comeback—how are we supposed to know this is a dedicated throwback cereal if we’re given no proof that diligence was done to recreate vintage Cocoa Puffs?
Golden Grahams is bringing back honey as an ingredient. Between this only being an eight-year throwback and the stuff not really tasting much different, we already know that perhaps the most exciting announcement of these four Comeback cereals didn’t really have that much effort put into it, in terms of palpable change.
Finally, Cookie Crisp promises the same generic chocolatey infusion as Cocoa Puffs, albeit phrased more dramatically by Chip the Wolf. If I’m interpreting his kerning correctly, this Cookie Crisp will have “More Chocolate Chip C∞oookie Taste!” Definitely a bold promise—if this Cookie Crisp grants me anything less than eternal life in a state of divinely cookie’d nirvana, I’ll be disappointed.
Alongside these cereals, as part of their Ultimate Cereal Comeback, General Mills will host The Ultimate Saturday Morning Drive-In, with guest Mario Lopez streaming classic cartoons in California and online, October 3rd. If there were ever a place for General Mills to surprise debut retro Monster Cereals, it’d be there. Just be sure to keep six feet (or cars) away from Boo Berry. Who knows what his ethereal plasm might’ve picked up.
I’ve talked about this on the blog before, but I believe there is an understated, yet sacred, beauty to foodstuffs that make the most out of minimal ingredients. This I have dubbed my “Egg & Cheddar on Ciabatta Theorem,” and I hear it’s gaining traction among renowned microgastronomists.
This framework of culinary thought applies to Golden Grahams. Not so much literally, as Golden Grahams have as many peripheral filler ingredients as any processed breakfast cereal, but Golden Grahams have at least maintained an overall brand reputation for unanointed simplicity. Golden Grahams cereal squares taste like honey graham crackers, simple as that. If you want more nuanced flavor, either buy a Golden Grahams Treat or buzz off (presumably into the open arms of Honey Maid S’Mores or Cinnamon Graham cereals).
Yet after decades of chaste cereal pride, leave it to a year like 2020 to see Golden Grahams not only breaking bold new graham ground but also revealing (by way of an apology) a betrayal eight years in the making.
Bam. Smelted Golden Grahams icing on a so-so Toaster Strudel. Boom. A way overripe Golden Grahams S’Mores Remix snack pouch. And now, the grand ka-pow: Retro Recipe Golden Grahams that…bring honey back as an ingredient?
This is so silly to me because a quick googling suggests honey wasn't removed from GG until like 2012, so the "Retro Recipe" is anything but.
There’s the betrayal. Maybe I’m the most deliberately ignorant Golden Grahams fan, but I had no clue honey left the cereal around 2012—a fact that makes the ’80s box theming feel a little disingenuous.
Regardless, I’m excited to taste real honey in my Golden Graham again. Like Plato’s Allegory of a Cave’s Continental Breakfast, I’ve lived nearly a decade with false faith in the Grahams I spooned before me.
Finally, a cereal snack that will scream D-J KHALED! when you open it.
That’s how remixes work nowadays, right?
Perhaps in line with their recent Retro Recipe debut, General Mills is releasing three pouched portmanteaus that pair familiar cereal pieces with other breakfast guest stars. As first shared by Candy Hunting, these Remixes aren’t quite shelf ready yet, but from what we can see, there’s plenty to speculate about.
The Cinnamon Toast Crunch Remix takes a pretty safe position: CTC squares and Churros join Vanilla Chex for what should be a fairly predictable hyper-sweet Toast Crunch Textural Medley. The Golden Grahams S’Mores Remix is also well-trodden territory for other big cereal companies, so I’m sure the name-brand GG thing will be good, but likely leave me craving a bigger serving.
Chocolate Toast Crunch’s Remix is the biggest surprise here, since Cocoa Puffs is usually General Mills’ flagship chocolate cereal—and I’ve heard from many people claiming Chocolate Toast Crunch has been discontinued, at least in their area. It’s also the only Remix that thinks outside the cereal box, enlisting caramel corn as well as Vanilla Chex again. Given how well H-E-B incorporated popcorn into their own caramel granola, I expect this Remix to be a standout hit, too.
All that said, my excitement for these Remixes is at a meek 5.5/10. Not saying I could’ve designed a more exciting trio of sweets *cough* Honey & Oat Cheerios Oat Crunch, Honey Nut Chex & Pralines *cough* but I faintly hope that if these are just store samples so far, they’ll get enough feedback to crank up the indulgence factor like a Rollercoaster Tycoon ride given a triple corkscrew loop.
This is a Cinnamon Toast Crunch callout post! Yes, I am weaponizing my half decade of accumulated cereal culture clout to criticize the gratuitous Toast Crunch idolatry of our times.
Don’t get me wrong, CTC is good, but I’m here to insist that it isn’t flawless and certainly isn’t immune to competition. Just like Honey Maid Cinnamon Graham Cereal before it, Malt-O-Meal’s Churr-O’s Cereal amply evidences this. Ostensibly a cut-and-dry reboot of the early 2010s’ Post Mini Cinnamon Churros, Churr-O’s nevertheless deserves a blind and unprecedented review, as Mini Cinnamon Churros were discontinued before I could use this blog to memorialize their intricacies.
Oh, and there’s a new Malt-O-Meal Not-Trix, too. “Pranks,” if you will. But we’ll get to those. Right now, we’ve got preconceived Toast Crunch-spectations to crush. Continue reading →
