Why waste time eating many small things when one big thing does the trick?
Such is the philosophy that has plagued cereal sales for the past decade—and for understandable reasons: breakfast as a temporally restricted concept is not what it used to be. For me, entering a workday with belly bloated rarely sounds appealing, especially since I’ve optimized my morning routine to essentially get me from bed to door in thoughtless, uninterruptible, and Rube-Goldbergian fashion. And clearly I’m not alone, as cereal companies have scrambled like diner eggs to adapt classic flavors for on-the-go breakfasting, while rebranding cereal itself as the midnight snack it was always destined to be.
But while concepts like breakfast shakes and mobile cereal receptacles are comparatively recent innovations, the world of cereal bars has largely eschewed architectural change, in favor of the tried and true “cereal bits bound by sweet-cream glue and shaped into crude rectangles” approach. Though I will say that in the case of General Mills bars, like these *new* Honey Nut Cheerios Treats, they’ve been getting smaller and lighter when compared to certain sugary bricks of yore (that can still apparently be bought, albeit only in cafeteria-friendly quantities).
I deeply enjoyed those aforementioned Honey Nut Cheerios “Milk ‘n Cereal Bars”—even if the freeze-dried milk sandwiched in the middle could practically be repurposed as sticky tack—so I’m interested to see how 2020’s slimmed-down take on America’s favorite cereal compares.
Three bites. That is, on average, how long it took me to inhale each Honey Nut Cheerios Treat.
Three days. That is how long it took me to reduce the entire box to hollow cardboard.
And yet, three (point two five?) out of five is, roughly, what I’d assign these Treats within the broader cereal bar canon. Because they’re fine and dandy, and as mindlessly munchable as sour candy, but Honey Nut Cheerios Treats also have a few texture and flavor issues.
Namely, the bars exist in an uncanny valley between crunchiness and chewiness. Upon initial molar touchdown, one gets the impression that these are hefty, fortified little things, because the thick gloss of diluted sugar that coats the bars makes for a surprisingly tough exoskeleton. But after this inaugural crunch, the bars’ constituent cereal shards are wispy, airy and chewy. The resulting dissonance in mouthfeel calls to mind the very texture of stale cereal exposed to air for too long, which immediately attaches an unfortunate placebo effect to the cereal bits’ flavor.
Sure, they don’t really taste stale, but whatever fossilizing preservative is used to keep the Cheerios looking sterling also detracts from what modest ribbons of genuine Honey Nut Cheerios flavor there are to enjoy here. I say modest, because the gooped-on foundation of each Honey Nut Cheerios Treats is the true attraction here. Tasting like the bedrock beneath the land of milk and honey, this layer is certainly tasty—I could totally see myself peeling it off with a cheese slicer in order to whittle it into a naturally decaying cereal spoon—but I wish it didn’t overpower the more floral honey and golden almond notes that have made Honey Nut Cheerios the cereal so iconic.
Despite these nitpicks (and all the toasted detritus I had to pick from between my teeth), it’s still easy to enjoy Honey Nut Cheerios Treats if you don’t think about them too hard. The boxes are small and not terribly expensive, so these Treats are worth the eat for fans of Cheerios and/or honey. Just don’t expect the full depth of wholesomeness that the cereal’s known for. Instead, look forward to simply pleasant honey’d sweetness—and steel your sense of mouthfeel for battle.
Because if you’re already going from crunchy to chewy and back again, you might as well spread some greek yogurt between two of these puppies and make it worth your digestive juices.
The Bowl: Honey Nut Cheerios Treats (2020)
The Breakdown: A texturally dubious and radical oversimplification of their namesake cereal, Honey Nut Cheerios are nevertheless enjoyable if you prefer your milk and honey in a more easily transported state of matter.
The Bottom Line: 6.5 hard-boiled cereal execs out of 10