Category Archives: Reviews

Review: Frosted Mini-Wheats Fruit Medley

Now is the winter of our choco-mint made flower-ish summer by this rounded fork!

…oh, sorry, I’ve just been brushing up on the Bard of Breakfast, William Shakespoon. With Kellogg’s banking on a shift toward summery flavors for 2019, it makes sense to prepare now for what’s shaping up to be a very good year for lovers of fruity cereal and cereal-adjacent products. This marks a pretty drastic turn after years of mostly earthy flavors, like chocolate, peanut, almond, and even coffee.

Speaking of which, remember that time (read: a couple of months ago) when they dropped Vanilla Latte Mini-Wheats? That was an unexpected star of the year for me, and now sits in regular rotation on my countertop. So my hopes were high upon spotting a box of the new Frosted Mini-Wheats Fruit Medley in the wild.

Mid-winter is a strange time to release such a bright box, but I presume it’s just Fruit Medley’s allusion to a classic Christmas melody. You know: “…and a cardboard in a pear tree?”

If you think your cringe at that one was bad, you should have seen my neighbors while I took the photo. They kept King Lear-ing at me.

Yep. Continue reading →

Posted by jared m.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: kellogg's. mini-wheats. 4 rating. 5 Comments

Dec. ’18

Review: Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros Cereal

There’s an old adage in the breakfast and breakfurious business of cereal: K.I.C.S., which of course stands for Keep It Cinn-ple Stupid.

The Toast Crunch family of cereals is many things: necromantic, with its obsessive reanimation of old products. It’s viral, as the cereal’s cinnamon-spiced squares infect products with only a tertiary connection to the cereal medium. And the Toast Crunches are borderline mythological, as one of their kin is seemingly set to rival Santa Claus in seasonal popularity (at least according to short surveys given to a small sample of IHOP parking lot-dwellers [my people!]).

Yes, these cereals are a complicated brood set on cereal domination. But they’re also clever, because they always keep things cinn-ple. Whether it’s actual Cinnamon Toast Crunch products or a fruity family tree outcrop, every T.C.-ereal know what strategy works for them, and they stick to it: sticking a flour sack’s worth of confectioner’s sugar-textured flavoring formula to pieces that are already mildly (but not distractingly) sweet, a 1-2 combo that could make even an End Piece of the Loaf Toast Crunch sound appealing.

Butt, I digress. New Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros are interesting by design, because you, like I, may think on the surface that it’s just a lazy reimagining of an old flavor, stolen from Post. Yet its fascination comes from the question of whether Cinnamon Toast Crunch’s heavenly ghost of cereal dust can survive on an airy puffed piece without its decades old shell of squared crisped wheat/rice. If so, how long before these noodly Churros grow arms?

Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 8 rating, cinnamon, general mills, toast crunch. 21 Comments

Dec. ’18

Review: Pop-Tarts Crisps (Strawberry & Brown Sugar Cinnamon)

Calling it now: 2019 is going to be the year of zany breakfast peripherals.

Just as the ’80s and early 2000s video game industries saw an influx of variably successful light guns, and philharmonic orchestra’s worth of plastic instruments, the 2k1x’s penultimate year is already promising a wealth of niche offshoots for familiar breakfast brands.

Whether any of these budding taste-buddies will make it into a Smash Bros. game is another story, but if the first creatively derived Pop-Tartform I tried is any indication, we might have to raise regular Pop-Tarts to the rafters like foil-wrapped fading stars.

So while I wait for Pop-Tarts Cereal to complete Kellogg’s new almost-er pastry trifecta, it’s time to crack open perhaps the most understated and underhyped of the three: Pop-Tarts Crisps.

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Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 9 rating, brown sugar, cinnamon, kellogg's, pop-tarts, strawberry. 1 Comment

Dec. ’18

Review: Strawberry Krispies Cereal

There are a lot of retro cereals Kellogg’s could’ve brought back.

Pokémon Cereal seems poised for a Detective Pikachu-themed comeback (hopefully without all the textured fur). OJ’s could fill the Orange Creampop Crunch-sized hole in my heart/roof of mouth. Or C3PO’s could return with special “Red Arm Marshmallows”—though I’m not sure anyone would recognize them at that point.

But no, rather than any of those, we got Strawberry Krispies. This 1983 cereal (with an early 2000s freeze-dried spiritual successor), is a tame choice—though I suppose it is a doubtlessly safer business investment for nosh-able necromancy than, say, Strawberry Crunchy Loggs.

But come on: that cereal was just a slow burner!

Wistful beggars can’t be choosers, I guess. Time to drown my crystal tears of extinct nostalgia in a few rose-tinted milk glasses instead.

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Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 7 rating, kellogg's, rice krispies, strawberry. 3 Comments

Dec. ’18

Review: Wild Harvest Blueberry Walnut Cereal

The breakfast aisle is guerrilla warfare. We have Malt-o-Meal cranking out hit after hit while Aldi’s in-house brand drops the surprise bomb of the holiday season. What the Cuphead is going on here?! I’m having ancestor-flashbacks to when an imitator started dressing like Hydrox and soon became America’s Favorite Cookie. So please, stick with me for a moment while I argue that the future very likely rests on the shoulders of companies we don’t even recognize.

Sometimes, I take a trip to the local hippie grocery chain to see what’s up in the world of avant granola. It was during one such venture that I spotted this perplexing bit of cerealia perched high up on a shelf in the ill-defined “healthy cereal” section. It stood out amid Barbara’s Puffins and Kashi GoLean because, more so than any other probiotic, low-sugar, organic, gluten-free, paleo, vegan option with 1000% of your daily fiber, the minimalist art shouts “wholesome.” Screams it. Through a megaphone. While standing in front of a celery poster. This is box art that could make Teddy Ruxpin burst into apologetic tears for not giving enough warm hugs to orphans.

Meet Wild Harvest, a brand with barely any discernible history or footprint in the marketplace. The enlarged image on their milquetoastly-named Blueberry Walnut Cereal looks a lot like one of the many pretenders to the Honey Bunches of Oats lineage. An investigation of the copyright reveals that Wild Harvest is an imprint of SuperValu, Inc. Inspired by Dan’s recent tumble down the rabbit bowl, I checked more into it. Here’s hoping I don’t need a secret handshake to get in. Continue reading →

Posted by jared m.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 8 rating, blueberry. 2 Comments

Dec. ’18

Review: Kellogg’s Honey Nut Frosted Flakes

As a wise little green friend once said:

“Always two there are; no more, no less.”

And while he may have been talking about an arcane order of insidiously apprenticed malevolence, I think the moral of that particular space opera applies to honey nut cereals, as well. See, Honey Nut Cheerios didn’t become America’s favorite cereal off alleged heart-healthiness alone.

No, Buzz’s magnum O-pus is far and away the most famous honey-nutted nectar on cereal shelves because it understands balance and simplicity like no other. The neutral-by-nature Cheerios base is basted with a simply satisfying glaze of golden, cozy honey and authentically ambrosial almond earthiness.

And that’s it: always two enriching and bewitching flavors. No more, no less.

This minimalist breakfast mantra was on my mind when cracking open Kellogg’s new Honey Nut Frosted Flakes. Tony’s take on a honey nut cereal, set to debut everywhere in early 2019, is clearly tiger-eyeing Cheerios’ lion share of the niche.

But can a cereal already so sweet really add a veneer of honey and nut without sugar-watering it down? It’s time to bee thorough. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 6 rating, frosted flakes, honey, kellogg's. 11 Comments

Dec. ’18

Review: Pop-Tarts Bites (Strawberry & Brown Sugar Cinnamon!)

Understanding the pervasive appeal of Pop-Tarts Bites is easy:

Would you rather have a bite of pie, or a bite of entire pie?
A red Skittle or a concentrated rainbow pill?
The east wall of a gingerbread house, or the entire 20-acre gingerbread farm?

My point is that while any individual bite of a Pop-Tart—which maxes out at around a quarter-Tart in extreme cases, or at least in my own—cannot possibly contain the same measured deliciousness as the entirety of a Pop-Tart, as in all of the crust and everything inside, in one bite. It’s like having a party-sized pizza, which typically have contentiously hand-soiling Cheese Only slices, vs. a whole-crust-and-kaboodle Pizza Roll.

Yes, Pop-Tarts Bites are tasty enough to surpass my typically quasi-topical recipe for review introductions. These spiritual successors to Pop-Tarts Mini Crisps (née Popsters) naturally come in the toaster pastry brand’s two unshakeable pillars of flavor: Strawberry & Brown Sugar Cinnamon. The de facto Pop-Tarts royal family will begin appearing in all their shrunken glory come January, but for now, I was postally blessed via Kellogg’s with enough pouches to last me ’til Christmas (edit: Christmas Eve) (edit 2: Christmas Eve Eve).

(edit 3: I need to stop eating these)

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Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 9 rating, brown sugar, cinnamon, kellogg's, pop-tarts, strawberry. 8 Comments

Dec. ’18

Review: Trader Joe’s Gingerbread Spice Granola

Ginger is the Michael Ironside of spices. That is to say, you may not recognize the flavor on its own, but that spicy rhizome appears in just about every baked worth its sodium bicarbonate. Like the iconically forgotten character actor, ginger is more versatile than a cyborg tardigrade. We’re talking about a guy who has shown up in everything from The A-Team to some project called Lucky’s Treasure, which seems relevant to our interests*.

And like that masterful performer, the absence of ginger is more notable than its presence. It’s no secret that a real gingerbread cereal has been at the top of our wish list for years (no, I refuse to recognize that failed prototype). Like Dan, I’m heavy on anything made of, containing, smelling like, or crafted in the same kitchen as gingerbread. Cookies? Absolutely. Cake? I believe that would be an empty plate you’re holding. Post-Thanksgiving, we’ve officially entered Hansel and Gretel territory until well into February. Trader Joe’s, ever on their seasonal jam, recently dropped this spicy bomb on us: Gingerbread Spice Granola.

As a cereal journalist-slash-critic, I have carefully tempered expectations most of the time. Not here, though. The package art alone is enough to breathe life into my Grinchy sense of objectivity (can we have Michael Ironside in that movie, too? Don’t tell me Col. Dugan harassing some Whovillians wouldn’t be a masterwork). It’s no Gingerbread Toast Crunch, but gingerbread in any form is cause for high hopes. To the bowl! Continue reading →

Posted by jared m.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 6 rating, gingerbread, granola, holiday, trader joe's. Leave a comment