♫ January, January: brings Dan no sanctuary. ♫

What? If no one else is going to start writing New Year’s carols, I might as well start drafting one to commemorate the first month of the year’s traditionally tumultuous tidal wave of new cereals. Don’t get me wrong, I’m geeked to see 2020’s freshest resolution-busters, but I will say that it’s a difficult time to both keep up and keep my fingers from burning down to the nubs from both friction and fructose.

Oh well: no strain, no whole grain.

First up is perhaps the most inherently dull cereal of the bunch, yet the bunchiest of the bunch as well. Special K with Bananas will (spoiler alert) add bananas to Special K cereal. Chances are if you are a Special K mark, you’ve already made up your mind on whether you’ll try this. As for me, I hold out little hope for new Special K varieties that only feature one dimension of new thinking. Whereas interesting spins like Apple Cinnamon and Blueberry Lemon featured pleasant chunks of yogurt to supplement the dry flakes, I worry that dehydrated bananas will only make Special K with Bananas as forgettable as Pumpkin Spice.

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Next up is the Walmart-first Reese’s Puffs BIG PUFFS. As this news item’s first responder The Junk Food Aisle notes, these Puffzillas aren’t entirely new: we saw them in test markets last year alongside Fillows and Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros, both of which made it to major retailers far sooner than these breakfast-ready Reese’s Cups-turned-Big Gulps.

While its first iteration promised Puffs that were 3x bigger, Giant Puffs prefers the way less scientific “way way way larger,” perhaps because it would take too much disclaimer copy to explain whether they’re three times the diameter or volume of a normal Reese’s Puff. This also calls to mind Cap’n Crunch’s supersized cereals that released during these Reese’s Puffs experimental phase. And since those bodacious Berries only succeeded in further destroying my palate like the cannon boulders in a Fisher Price castle, I can’t get too excited for Giant Reese’s Puffs without upgrading my dental plan to include tongue degloving.

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Next up is a funny one, in more ways than one.

I actually first found out about Frosted Honey Bunches of Oats several months ago, when I stumbled upon a tragically pixelated box photo on a Post & Malt-O-Meal sampling site. But before I could even save it, Post must’ve caught wind of my snooping and password-locked the entire site. It’s good to know my corporate optics have upgraded from “forgettable blogger” to “persistent pest.”

Since I couldn’t prove it, I didn’t want to spill the beans on Frosted Honey Bunches of Oats in case it never actually came out. But thanks to The Impulsive Buy we can now see just how funny this entire concept is in stunning high definition.

Regular Honey Bunches of Oats include half sugar-coated flakes, and half plain corn flakes (plus bunches, of course). So rather than calling them Frosted Honey Bunches of Oats, they really could’ve used the clunkier, but more honest “Honey Bunches of Oats with 100% more Frosting!”

Either way, I’m skeptical whether more sugar will make an already tried-and-true trio of crunchiness any better. But hey, let’s just thank God and Diana Hunter that they didn’t add marshmallows.

Our final bit of cereal(ish) foresight is Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cinnamilk Mix. Priced at $27 for a cinnamix and cookies set, this Milk Bar & Cinnamon Toast Crunch partnership really straddles the line between haute stuff and hoity-toity treats.

Of course, if you need to make a half gallon of cereal milk for a lighter price tag, you can always squeeze a box of the real dairy-doused stuff through a cheesecloth. From there, if you decide to barrel-age it in your basement until it curdles a sentient desire to grant wishes, I won’t tell the feds.

Though it may sound like I’m being pessimistic about everything in this post, I believe in setting expectations low for a type of product that, even at worst, can still be dry-munched in the most remote pew at Christmas mass. If you have any other new news you’d like to see on this blog, hit me up!