Author Archives: dan g.

Review: Three Wishes Cocoa Cereal

Three Wishes Cocoa Cereal Review Box

There are a lot of tough jobs in this world: oil rig worker, skyscraper window washer, lumberjack. But if we’re talking about a real David vs. Goliath battle of wits and resources, being an indie cereal maker is a profession where you have to overcome a lot of lopsided odds. Trying to market a new breakfast product against multi-billion dollar corporate behemoths like General Mills or Kellogg’s means accepting that your product will have to cost more and work harder without decades of brand recognition and cheap, bulk ingredients.

This is naturally why many independent cereal companies target their own niche of cereal consumers. Since the world’s cereal giants usually lack truly wholesome releases for those eating low carb, high protein, gluten-free or organic diets, we’ve seen any number of specialty or boutique breakfast startups offering cereals that are theoretically more healthy than any Special K or Kashi product.

From Magic Spoon and Cereal School to OffLimits and Three Wishes, there’s a lot of growing competition in the specialty cereal game. So how do you tell them apart? Well, for me it all comes down to the base grain*, which I’ve asterisked because several of these use grain alternatives like tapioca flour or chicory root fiber. If you read my first review of Three Wishes Cereal, where I covered their three introductory flavors, I noted how they perform a lot better in the base grain camp.

Does their newest release measure up? Let’s find out in three (wishes), two (wishes), one (wish)… Continue reading

Spooned & Spotted: Lucky Charms Just Magical Marshmallows

Lucky Charms Just Magical Marshmallows

Well, they finally did it. After years of exclusive sweepstakes and crass imitations, Lucky Charms is offering anyone the chance to buy a 6oz pouch of ALL MARSHMALLOWS.

First reported by Saturday Morning Nostalgia and spotted at both Food City and Walmart, Lucky Charms Just Magical Marshmallows feels like a product that should have naturally came out decades ago. Granted, five-pound bags of generic cereal marshmallows have been just a Google search away for years now, but there’s something climactic about finally being able to buy the premium, name brand stuff.

Now what exactly do you do with so many rainbow-hued sugar nuggets? Well that’s up to your imagination. Microwave them together into a s’more-ready puck. Bake them into cookies. Or just make a bowl of Uh-Oh! Lucky Charms with just a few oat pieces scattered about. The world is your purple horseshoe!

Review: Minecraft Creeper Crunch Cereal

Minecraft Creeper Crunch Cereal Review - Box

If you came to this page in hopes of finding the Minecraft Creeper Crunch Cereal review with the fewest cheeky nods to the game, you’re in luck! Minecraft Creeper Crunch Cereal (surprisingly) deserves more respect than that. So I won’t be telling you how its “goodness creeps up on you,” how you “really should fill up a bucket of it,” nor how much I’d love to “swim in a swampy biome of it.”

Nope, just straight facts from here on out, promise: Minecraft Creeper Crunch is the latest in a long line of Kellogg’s licensed cereals following a similar squares-‘n’-marbits formula. From Frozen Cereal to Finding Dory Cereal, this is as inoffensive and forgettable as licensed cereals get, which may not sound great, but the bar for movie tie-in releases is set lower than bed—I can’t. Don’t make me say it.

Bedroc—

No. Enough is enough. The point is that, since Kellogg’s cereals of this breed actually use oat flour in their little squared circles, they’re just barely within spitting distance of Lucky Charms in terms of how good an oats with marshmallows cereal can be. All they were missing was an it factor. A flavor nebula unexplored by man or leprechaun. And yes, Cinnamon Vanilla Lucky Charms happened, but the cheap vanilla only cut the cinnamon’s potency. No, Minecraft Creeper Crunch is a pure cinnamon and marshmallows cereal, baby. 

Minecraft Creeper Crunch Cereal Review

Now before you go correcting me on the uniqueness of a cinnamon-marshmallow cereal, I’ll clarify: corn-based Marshmallow Apple Jacks cannot hang, But you are right, in that there is an old cereal worth comparing with Minecraft Cereal.

Can you guess it?

Continue reading

News: Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cinnadust Seasoning Blend

Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cinnadust

Ha, good luck catching me now, legal sharks: let’s see how your eyes like…

POCKET CINNADUST!

I have reason to practice such self defense. When I first leaked news of a Cinnamon Toast Crunch seasoning blend several months ago, I immediately had to take the post down after being served a crisp Cinnamon Toast Cease & Desist Letter. Granted, it was sent not by General Mills but by a company that focus-groups new product ideas, but it is funny that this one actually came out, since a lot of products teased in programs like that never come to fruition.

I mean seriously: why Cinnadust? It’s ostensibly just cinnamon and sugar together in a spice bottle, which you can already buy, right? Well, the product’s official release also claims there are traces of vanilla and graham to be found within, which, aside from being exciting, really makes this more of a Post Honey Maid Cinnamon Graham Cereal Seasoning Blend, huh?

No matter its specific formulation, Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cinnadust is sure to have a lot of applications when it releases this September at Sam’s Club, and in 2021 everywhere else. You could wear it on your face like fake five o’clock shadow. You could pretend to sneeze it out and convince people you’re cereal-blooded.

You could even bring it to the beach and return it to nature, allowing it to mingle with fish bones and driftwood once more.

Spooned & Spotted (Mexico): Kellogg’s Panaderia Cereals

Kellogg's of Mexico: Panaderia Cereals

Oh no, y’all: cereal is dead!

…that’s right, dead serious about celebrating Día de Muertos!

Kellogg’s of Mexico is making headlines for a new trio of Panaderia (Bakery) cereals releasing in Mexico early this autumn—and not all the buzz is the good, sugary kind, either. With Twitter users and media outlets alike questioning whether this should be considered cultural appropriation on Kellogg’s part, these Churros, Rollos de Canela and Pan de Muerto cereals have already been spotted by some shoppers and reviewed by others.

Though they may sound extremely similar, Kellogg’s Panaderia Churros Cereal appears to be flavored with cinnamon and brown sugar, while Rollos de Canela uses cinnamon and vanilla. However, more unique than either is Pan de Muerto Cereal. Based on the popular sweet bread made for Day of the Dead celebrations, this cereal version boasts not only vanilla, but butter and orange blossoms as ingredients, too. Since the last orange-vanilla cereal we saw in America was named my favorite release of that year, Pan de Muerto Cereal might just be worth the cost of importing it.

Have you tried any of these three yet? Let us know in the comments below!

 

Review: Funfetti Cereal

New Funfetti Cereal Review Box

I Turned [REDACTED] And All I Got For My Birthday Was This Lousy Cake Cereal

Well of course, this isn’t entirely true—I also got a heck of a champagne headache and a long arm scratch from a cat who wasn’t as playful as I was. But nevertheless, the highest peaks of yesterday’s celebrations had nothing to do with the trough-full of sugary spheres that happened to make an incidental appearance.

Maybe I’m spoiling this review by leaking my distaste for Funfetti Cereal, but hey: it’s my post-party and I can post what I want to. Plus, I have yet to be impressed by a cereal marketed as vanilla or birthday cake, so my only scant hope for Funfetti Cereal was that—since no one really knows who’s manufacturing the cereal—it could crumb out of left field with, oh, I don’t know, actual freeze-dried frosting piped into every puff or something. As I mentioned in my news post on this cereal, the Funfetti and Pillsbury branding is a bit confusing. You’d expect General Mills to be behind this, but they only own the rights to Pillsbury cookies, biscuits, cinnamon rolls, etc., not Funfetti or other dry baking mixes.

So who’s actually behind this confetti-caked crunch fest? And is it even worth finding out? Continue reading

Review: Pillsbury S’Mores Golden Grahams Toaster Strudel

New Pillsbury S'Mores Golden Grahams Toaster Strudel Review - Box

P. is for pouches, they’re foiled & grand!
O. is for OH YES!, my response to the brand.
P. is for pouches, c’mon can’t you read?
– is the hyphenated joy of a fast feed.
T. is for toasted, as all Tarts should be.
A. is for awesome, this crust fills me with glee!
R. is for Raspberry, the worst compared to Strawberry.
T. is for the filling: is it good? My answer: very.
S. is for sweet icing, a true sort of edible art.

And those, my friends, are the reasons I love Pop-Tarts.

Okay phew, I’ve put the Kellogg’s execs reading this to sleep: now let’s talk about how good these Toaster Strudels are.

Sure, I’ll be the first to admit that I have very little Toaster Strudel experience. I grew up on P-T (which is, in a sense, the opposite of P.T. the game), and with that kind of lifelong conditioning, anything more than tearing open a crumb-spewing pouch with the elegance of a resident campsite raccoon feels like too much work to get a toaster pastry in my stomach.

But if there’s one flavor I’d move mountains for—assuming there’s a rich vein of graham’d ore to suckle beneath them—it’s Golden Grahams. Though I have no proof of this, Golden Grahams seems to be the most popular cereal that never gets flavor variants, despite how obvious the possibilities are. Perhaps this is just a testament to Golden Graham’s chaste and pure breakfast beauty, but with a bunch of other s’mores cereals out there using Golden Grahams-esque pieces, it’s kind of strange that the General Mills brand has only given Golden Grahams the S’Mores treatment in cereal bars and now flaky strudels—maybe when GM’s legendary S’Mores Crunch was discontinued way back, the S’Morecerer casted an unbreakable “do nut resuscitate” spell in retaliation.

Unblazed cereal frontiers aside, I’m excited to get my large rectangular graham on, a little thicker than usual. Continue reading

Quick Review: Tropical Froot Loops (2020)

2020 Tropical Froot Loops Box Cereal Review

There are many harsh truths in this world: nothing is fair, some people genetically can’t enjoy cilantro, and they’re just going to keep putting tags on shirts even though a flappy piece of rough fabric slapping your tender neck seems like an antithetical idea when considering the purpose of clothing.

Oh, and one more: there can only be one Froot Loops. The rest must be considered “Worse Loops.”

I’ve reviewed Tropical Froot Loops once already, so I will keep this quick. As my Empty Bowl cohost Justin accurately states, these deserve the title of “Froot Loops,” while the O.G. stuff can crawl back under whatever lab-synthesized schnozzberry bush they came from. But did the full cornucopia of goodness found in the once Mexico-exclusive Tropical Froot Loops survive their flight north for the summer?

Well seem to think so. Justin disagreed in our latest episode, but if my discerning taste buds weren’t able to detect a difference in Kellogg’s localized Loops, I doubt most people will have a problem. Mostly because, if you never tried (i.e. spent $20–$30 to import) Mexican Tropical Froot Loops when they came out, you’ll be too enchanted by this island time experience to get granularly critical. Continue reading