I hate Oreo Puffs.

Not because they taste bad, mind you—they’re perfectly serviceable as a milquetoast little cookies & cream cereal that tastes more or less exactly like Oreo O’s.

No, I hate Oreo Puffs because they perfectly encapsulate the ongoing creative decline of the cereal industry.

I’m sure most people would agree that cereal “isn’t as good as it used to be.” And sure, a big part of that is how we view retro cereals through rose-tinted taste buds. Everything tasted better when you were a kid, because you didn’t have adult responsibilities, nor an adult’s sensitive stomach and tolerance for black coffee that makes sweet things taste just too sweet.

But it’s also impossible to deny that, on a pure formulation level, cereals are worse now. Time and time again, Big Cereal makers are replacing or diluting heartier base grains like wheat and oat flour with cheaper, mealier, obtrusively flavored corn flour. They’re also streamlining the geometry, cutting back on fun marbit shapes and turning everything into spheres—again, probably because it’s cheaper than running a bunch of different extruder machines. They’re removing fun and games from the back of the box and replacing them with simplistic graphics or pithy copy. Meanwhile, the very idea of a “free prize inside” is fossilized in a museum somewhere, I think next to the Diplodocus.

And perhaps worst of all, Big Cereal just isn’t releasing anything novel or interesting. Sure, there are exceptions, even in a strikingly uninspired year like 2024, but by and large, new cereals fall into one of three camps: a reintroduction of a cereal that already existed, a cross-application of a flavor they’ve already used elsewhere, or something that no one in their right mind ever asked for.

Post’s Oreo Puffs, as the omni-paradigm of an unimaginative “new” cereal, does all of the above and more (by which I mean less).

Because—and I hate to break this to you—Oreo Puffs aren’t just Oreo O’s’s superfluous cousin. No, they’re replacing Oreo O’s on shelves altogether.

I was aghast upon learning this, since, to me, Oreo O’s is cereal, in the sense that it boldly represents everything that people love about cereal and its late-20th century Golden Age. Oreo O’s let you eat cookies for breakfast. Its ads featured goofy little sunglasses-wearing blobmen who’d dance and dive into bowls. And Oreo O’s even triumphed over a decade-plus discontinuation purely because everyone wanted it back—and every BuzzFeed listicle writer yearned for it.

So even though Oreo O’s’s 2017 return didn’t taste quite as good as the ’90s version, everyone was still pretty happy to see it on shelves. Then we even got variants: Mega Stuf Oreo O’s, Golden Oreo O’s, even Mint Chip Oreo O’s. So why, then, is the doughnut-shaped rug being pulled out from under us now?

I’m no fool. I know the cereal industry isn’t doing super well and hasn’t been for a while. Fewer and fewer people want to start their morning with empty carbs—if they even eat breakfast at all. But what came first, the sugar bomb or the crash out? Are people eating cereal less because it sucks now, or does cereal suck now because no one’s eating it?

Hard to say, but I just wish the faceless names behind Big Cereal would be honest about, well, anything, instead of putting lipstick on hogwash new releases with saccharine quips like this one, from Post’s Chief Growth Officer TD Dixon:

“For those who love dunking their Oreo cookies in milk, Oreo Puffs cereal is a brand new, delicious way to enjoy the taste of the iconic Oreo cookie — during breakfast time!”

First of all, TD, there is nothing brand new or scandalously transgressive about Oreo Puffs! We’ve been eating Oreos for breakfast for years! That’s the whole reason you’re making this statement about Oreo Puffs replacing the O’s!

Also, no one really talks like this! I get it, it’s a PR statement that TD never said nor wrote—I also ghostwrite my fair share of executive quotes at my day job—but when the person writing it knows it means nothing, because they weren’t allowed to say anything of substance, why even say it? Who’s reading it, let alone digesting it? Do they even care about cereal?

I guess that’s just what Oreo Puffs feels like to me: a hollow downgrade that no one will admit was created to save fractions of a penny even though there’s no chance anyone will remember it as fondly as Oreo O’s. And then, once enough time has passed, they’ll bring Oreo O’s back to capitalize on its absence once more. I see the game, and it’s no fun to play any more.

Anyway, sorry to kick off 2025 with such a negative rant (and my first post in many months; perhaps you understand why now). Let it be known that, at the end of the day and the start of the year, I’m not really mad about Oreo Puffs. I’m an adult with family, friends, hobbies, and goals—the state of the cereal industry will not make or break my happiness.

But at the same time, it is just a little bit sad, since I started this blog when I was a starry-eyed high schooler with earnest reverence for the kooky world of breakfast cereal, and especially in recent years, I’ve grown more and more jaded toward whatever creeping corporate apathy is sucking the magic and passion out of the cereal aisle to pad their bottom line.

Maybe that’s all it really is: I was young and now I’m less young, Old Man Yells at Cloud, etc. etc. Nothing I’m saying is novel, and cereals have always existed to make money. But hey, at least back then we got Marsha the Marshmallow and a free Rocky Road Mini-Piano instead of what’s on the back of this Puffs box:

I don’t know what the future of cereal holds, and I’ll never entirely give up Hope™ that Big Cereal® will one day return to What It Once Was™, but For Now®, I’m going out back and burying these Oreo Puffs™ 6 feet deep.

---

The Bowl: Oreo Puffs

The Breakdown: These soulless, usurping spheres are everything wrong with the cereal industry. But hey, at least they have marshmallows now.

The Bottom Line: 1 prayer sent out to Cap’n Crunch to save us out of 10

Note: I received these Oreo Puffs for free from Post, but this (obviously) did not impact my opinion. Also, sorry for going scorched earth, Post: nice job on the Chocolate Honey Bunches of Oats!