Category Archives: Reviews

Review: Strawberry Milkshake Frosted Flakes & Cinnamon French Toast Frosted Flakes

Note: though Chocolate is included in this lineup of new boxes, I won’t be reviewing it here, since it’s unchanged. You can find my original review here.

Tony, my man. Can I call you Tony Baloney?

No?

How about Riga-Tony? Tonyboy? Tony Island Mile-High Chili Dogs?

Alright, fine, let’s just get down to business…Anthony. Fact of the matter is, I’m impressed. You’re really embracing your right brain lately. I know it can be tempting to trust your business sense and realize that you could probably finance the entire Frosted Flakes brand interminably just by cheaply chucking in new marbits and mixing together existing cereals. But as much of a smart tiger as you are, I can tell you’re truly an artist at heart. And an athlete, too—geez, no wonder the Twitter furries thirsted you off the platform: you’ve got it all!

You’re so creatively inclined that you decided to bless us with not one, but two twinkling new cereal flavors—and neither have chintzy, redundant marshmallows! Sure, my bar for being impressed by new cereals has limboed lower and lower over the past purgatorial half year of lazy cereal-smithing, but hey, I’m going to stay positive and tackle the Strawberry Milkshaked and Cinnamon French Toasted fruits of your labor with gusto. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: cinnamon, frosted flakes, kellogg's, maple, strawberry. 1 Comment

May. ’22

Review: General Mills Filled Bites (Prototypes?)

Allow me to preface this review with the disclaimer that I honestly have no idea if these Filled Bites will ever hit mainstream shelves. I first heard about these two cereals via the insider tip of a Hy-Vee worker at a Minneapolis location often used as a General Mills new product test store. Then I got these two boxes (with different artwork) from reader Ryan (thank you kindly!), but they also seem like samples. The artwork feels more finalized, but it’s just art on both sides, plus the box is a thinner cardboard than regular cereal boxes.

Plus plus, there’s a landing page out there for a possible Cinnamon Toast Crunch Filled Bites—which, while still apparently in its prototype stage would likely replace Pillsbury Cinnamon Roll here—as CTC no doubt has bigger brand clout with the kids today than portly/chortly ol’ Poppin’ Fresh. That guy lost the youth the minute the similarly glossy Hamburger Helper rhymed him outta relevancy.

Which is all to say that, ultimate widespread legitimacy of these Filled Bites aside, I feel a need to review them, if only to uphold the ephemeral legacy of Fillows—a decidedly dank and decadently dense cereal line that deserved way better. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: cinnamon, general mills, golden grahams, s'mores. 2 Comments

Apr. ’22

Review: Cinnamon Toast Crunch Creamy Cinnamon Spread

There are some things it feels like you just can’t do on supermarket shelves, even if there’s no explicit rule against it.

You can’t put a cute mascot shaped like a carton of milk on a box of bleach. Or at least I imagine you probably can’t.

You can’t say your plastic bottle is made from “100% Ocean-Bound Plastic” because that’s worded so confusingly and sounds like it’s made 100% from plastic that’s bound for the ocean, rather than just adding a word and saying “100% Previously Ocean-Bound Plastic.” But Windex does this anyway.

And you can’t market cinnamon bun pancake batter as a versatile creamy spread. It just feels criminal! Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: cinnamon, general mills, non cereal. 5 Comments

Apr. ’22

Review: Sonic the Hedgehog Cereal

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 might just be the best video game movie ever.

Sonic the Hedgehog Cereal, meanwhile, is a country mile from being the best video game cereal (my top 3 would be OG Pokémon Cereal, Nintendo Cereal System, and, surprisingly, Minecraft Creeper Crunch).

Just what went wrong with the Blue Blur’s big-box breakfast debut? Well, it starts with the cereal’s poorly promoted existence. When I first got a PR email about this cereal, it was worded very informally. This is exactly all I was told:

“Available nationwide starting in March, Sonic the Hedgehog cereal is honey flavored with sonic marshmallows. The cereal pieces are gold and ring shaped, representing the gold rings from the video game/movie. The blue marshmallows represent sonic swirling around. The green emeralds represent green emeralds from the sonic games.”

Lack of capital letters aside, the problem is that the release date was set for March, before Sonic 2 released in theaters, but it’s only finally been spotted in stores as of yesterday. This all makes me wonder if the cereal was delayed and subsequently(/fittingly) rushed—the box itself reflects this, with the “enlarged to show detail” text appearing very poorly printed and scarcely legible. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: general mills, honey, movie cereals. 2 Comments

Mar. ’22

Review: Crumbl Cereal Cookies!

Apologies for the in situ photos—wanted to taste them as close to received temperature as possible.

*Sighs*

*Chisels sedimentary crust from my eyes*

Alright, play the song.

Even though I’m still something-ing my way through my twenties, I’ve been making a lot of jokes lately about feeling old, especially the more I realize that today’s cereal game is far different than the one I grew up with. Whereas I had Chex Quest and Millsberry, today’s kids have color-changing cereal kicks and celebrities turned into cereal pieces that are also emojis. Cereal hasn’t gotten any more or less weird, mind you, just a different kind of weird.

And if there’s any cerebrally immersive church suitable for that newfangled high strangeness, it’s Crumbl Cookies.

As someone who’s not on TikTok (by deliberate design; I’d get nothing done), there are so many trends I just don’t know about. Ergo, the cult appeal of Crumbl Cookies has been totally lost on me this whole time. I just never knew it was a thing, let alone a thing with millions and millions of devoted fans who flock to Crumbl’s’s 300+ locations weekly to try the bakery’s new flavor rotations. In my head, the popular paradigm for buzzworthy desserts is still a serve-yourself froyo shoppe, which in reality is becoming an endangered species compared to Crumbl.

So there I am at my local Crumbl, wide-eyed, slack-jawed, and soul-awed, waiting in line behind a dozen people who are also waiting to try the brand’s four new cereal cookies—as another dozen employees scoop, roll, and bake the doughy discs in a pink-saturated open-concept kitchen. It’s all quite the spectacle—and reminds me of the bubblegum efficiency of Black Mirror’s Nosedive episode—even if I felt a little out of my element (I tend to have more of a salty than a sweet tooth, believe it or not, so I’m less apt to go out for treats and instead just have a bowl of cereal at home). I also admittedly received a voucher from Crumbl to review these cookies, so it was especially funny to see the cashier’s reaction to my coupon redemption, her seeming to think I was a hip TikTok influencer instead of a crusty millennial cereal blogger.

But that’s enough about the setting, let’s talk about the eating.

Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: non cereal. Leave a comment

Mar. ’22

Review: Boston Creme Donut Pop-Tarts

Milk Chocolate Graham

Choco Graham Pop-Tarts

Milkchocolategraham Poptart Wheretofind

Why’d they stop making MCG PTs

Bring Back Milk Chocolate Graham Pop-Tarts

Ope, sorry, I thought this was Google for a second. You see, it’s been eight years since Pop-Tarts, for their 50th brand-iversary, brought retro flavor Milk Chocolate Graham back to shelves (it’s original release date is unclear, but way before I was born), and I still haven’t gotten over it. The little things were pretty unassuming and didn’t yield many rave reviews, but I adored them for their graham forwardness and the way they eschewed the fluffy filler of S’Mores Pop-Tarts to focus on that campfire treat’s real most defining components.

To this day, Milk Chocolate Graham is my favorite Pop-Tarts flavor ever, and chocolate Pop-Tarts in general are my favorite toaster pastry genre, so whenever a new Choco-Tart drops, I muster a few feeble prayers in hope that the new kid on the fudgy block will live up to the precedent set by the likes of Chocolate Fudge, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, and yes, Milk Chocolate Graham.

Boston Creme Donut Pop-Tarts are the latest such Tart in the Brotherhood of Sweet, Sweet Brown—the first new chocolate Pop-Tart flavor, in fact, since 2020’s phenomenal Chocolatey Churro. But are these BCD Pop-Tarts an answer to my prayers, or the cruel curling of a monkey paw’s middle finger? There’s only one way to find out, and it involves wiggling my own fingers whimsically with a “don’t mind if I do” muttered in my empty kitchen. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: chocolate, kellogg's, non cereal, pop-tarts. 5 Comments

Feb. ’22

Review: Pebbles Shake-Ups!

What qualifies as a successfully transformative “Shake Up” (let alone one with an exclamation point at the end) in the cereal world? Is it enough to simply “shake together” a bunch of existing cereal bits, or do you need to “shake in” something entirely new? Well we’re about to find out, because Pebbles’ new pair of pieced-together pouches represent both ends of that continuum, and I’m here to be the supreme arbiter—the Lady Justice holding the bowl-shaped scales, if you will—of just how good they really are.

So let’s do this, Post: shake up my stomach like a wedding-day bottle of champagne! Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: birthday cake, chocolate, honeycomb, pebbles, post, waffle crisp. Leave a comment

Feb. ’22

Review: Eggo Maple Waffle Pop-Tarts & Apple Fritter Pop-Tarts

Edible trading cards.

That’s what I’ve been calling Pop-Tarts for years, and it only feels more accurate the wackier these little pastries get. I mean, think about it: foil wrapping, colorfully zany designs, printed fun, mysteries, and different attack formations (plain, toasted, frozen).

What, you’re telling me you’ve never crammed your Blue-Eyes White Dragon in the toaster? No wonder you’ve lost touch with the ~~Heart~~ Tart of the Cards.

Anyway, Kellogg’s latest P-T booster pack boasts some heavy hitters: Eggo Frosted Maple, Apple Fritter, and Boston Creme Donut (which I was tragically unable to track down). Let’s let these first two duel it out on the battlefield of my palate, and see who ends up with more life points (spoiler alert, but after eating this many Pop-Tarts, it certainly won’t be me). Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: apple, kellogg's, maple, pop-tarts. 2 Comments