What’s more emotionally resonant than 5,000 candles in the wind? 15,000 cardboard vessels bearing thousands more sugar-smithed unicorn heads riding a manifold wave of cresting rainbows.
And that’s before you add milk.
This ferociously (and fangoriously) devoured fantasy is more likely than you think: once again, Lucky Charms is giving away specially designed boxes of All Marshmallows—but this time, each 270g iridescent treasure chest is full of only rainbows and unicorns.
Let’s talk turkey. Or bunnies, to be seasonally appropriate.
When you’re reviewing breakfast fare, a scale is necessary. I won’t feign presumptions on how those who write about lesser foodstuffs manage to assign numerical ratings. What constitutes a perfect 10 in, say, pizza? Are there dual systems for thin crust and deep dish? Such are the fodder phantasms that haunt my countertop in the night.
Comparatively, then, I’m grateful for pantry paragons that act as polestars. We know that no cereal on the market today can, however mighty, topple Cracklin’ Oat Bran from its lofty position—even if matched by other exceptional staples. But it’s hard to compare everything against the crème de la crunch. Once in a while, we need to be reminded that superb bowls (heyoo!) exist only in light of normal, unremarkable cereal. We grade Gaussian around these parts, folks, no matter how much one may love log.
So Annie’s released a new cereal. Sort of. Remember Annie’s Homegrown? They make feel-good versions of classic favorites, like organic boxed mac and cheese, organic graham crackers, and organic fruit gummies, all in the shape of their lagomorph mascot. It’s a cute concept, often with a nightmare-conjuring price tag. This one, for instance, runs over $4 USD at my local Walmart for a relatively dinky box.
Naturally, one assumes that quality costs more. And although that hasn’t been the case historically, hare hops spring eternal. Continue reading
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For a guy who’s spent his entire 56-year career preaching the Gospel of Froot, Toucan Sam has rarely explored the complex taste spectrum the broad pantheon of seed-dispersal vessels (aka fruit) has to offer.
And he still hasn’t canonized the late Carmen Miranda yet either, so I refuse to acknowledge his scripture’s legitimacy over the Dead Trix Scrolls.
Sure, we’ve gotten smoothie-fied Froot Loops, Wild Berry Froot Loops, and my favorite fruit, Birthday Cake, but the Froot Loops family of flavors still largely sticks to a single, extremely ambiguous and in no way authentic fake fruit cocktail instead of charting new latitudes of crunchy cartography—the closest thing we’ve gotten is vacation-shaped marshmallows.
That is, until now: according to Mexican Candy Lady and renowned cereal documentarian Gabe Fonseca, Mexico now has exclusive Tropical Froot Loops. This variety sees the Loops dressed in the more modest hues of a Jamba Juice sampler, with promises of banana and pineapple flavoring.
Ha, what do you know: they turned my favorite fruit, pineapple upside-down cake, into a weird spiky thing!
Unfortunately, the Mexican Candy Lady’s shop still lists Tropical Froot Loops as out of stock, so I won’t be able to review them—at least until I dream about a Cancún getaway tonight…though you’ll have to meet me at the cerebral bungalow if you want to hear about it.
Luckily she does still have new Froot Loops Pops in stock, which appear to be another name (that references Canada’s spherical Corn Pops, perhaps) for the joyous Froot Loops Bloopers that have been out intermittently here in the states.
If you’ve tried Tropical Froot Loops (or want to launch me a box via intercontinental trebuchet), let me know what you think below. And if you have a hemisphere-spanning cereal spotting of your own, you can follow your nose to our Submissions page.
Is Toucan Sam starting a breakfast bestiary? And if so, why?
Of all the cereal brands out there, I wouldn’t have expected Froot Loops to start a weird off-shoot series of pseudo-spiritual successors that draw from the world of myths and mutants. Despite its history with otherworldly creatures, Froot Loops seems a little too innocently avian to flirt with Unicorns and now Mermaids—that’s the kind of crunchy cryptozoology I’d expect from the likes of Kellogg’s own grinning Ra who represents their -isin Bran.
Exclusive to Costco, these Australia-exclusive Mermaid Froot Loops seems like a parallel universe version of Caticorn Cereal, a quasi-Froot Loops pet project that has a temporary Sam’s Club exclusivity here in the states. But while Caticorn Cereal was littered with ghosts of faint fruitiness, Mermaid Froot Loops appear to just be Mardi Grad-colored Loops—though their lack of artificial colors and flavors raise the question of just how genuine the expected Froot Loops fakeness will taste.
today I learned that Australian Kellogg's cereals still exist in a blessed timeline where the mascots didn't mutate into uncanny 3D renders pic.twitter.com/fA1za5Wgis
— Cerealously 🥛🥣 (@cerealouslynet) March 18, 2019
Regardless, Australian Froot Loops deserve my respect, not just for putting a female mascot on a cereal box—an apparently unheard of phenomenon in the U.S. outside of, uh, Dora the Explorer Cereal?—but also for preserving the two-dimensional purity of Toucan Sam, whose American counterpart has become an anthropomorphized terror who would just love to show you how double-jointed his slender, feathered fingers are.
If you’ve tried Mermaid Froot Loops, let me know how they are in the comments. And if you’ve managed to catch another new cereal cryptid on camera, you can share them on our Submissions page—our thanks to Hedvig for the Mermaidian tip.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! If by chance you need something to float in your green beer—or at least something hearty and oaty enough to absorb out of your green-gilled gut later—you can catch a box of Lucky Charms’ storied St. Paddy’s Day stuff in both plain ol’ oat and sweet chocolate corn varieties.
Once filled only with two-toned green shamrock marshmallows, Lucky’s bowl o’ merriment has added twinkling pots of gold, as well—a good colorful addition, though I’d love to see the exiled hourglass marshmallow make a yearly prodigal return instead.
All that said, this year’s Leprechaun Trap concept, which has been appearing on every Lucky Charms variety, doesn’t really target my age demographic. Let’s hope we can see gradual innovation year by year on this concept, so in about a decade’s time we can have Mint Lucky Charms Shamrocks that turn your milk into Bailey’s.
Foiled again by these un-foiled Easter animals!
Yes, Reese’s Puffs’ go-to spring seasonal shapes, Bunnies, have returned once more. And while I love the things for their increased surface area and the cocoa-catching crevasses of their angular anatomy, I was hoping we’d finally get the PB-stuffed Reese’s Puffs Eggs I’ve been dreaming of ever since I first dunked a real oblong Easter Reese’s into a tall glass of Peeps nectar.
(Okay, I didn’t actually use the Peeps juice. You ever try milking one of those things?)
While the actual bite-sized Bunnies appear to be the same, this year’s boxes strip away the old pastel pastiche that mimicked Reese’s other Easter wrappers in favor of a classical brand styling that’s more in line with the cereal’s other limited edition holiday Puff sculpts. Being a washed-up warrior of washed-out colors, I’m a little disappointed by this decision, but I suppose cheerful yellow doesn’t have much place in a cereal known for being an impulsively grabbed orange eye-catcher—it’s the veritable Krispy Kreme Hot Light of the breakfast aisle.
That is of course, unless you add Peeps Coffee Creamer.
Thanks to Dominic C. for the real-life proof. If you have a new cereal find of your own, feel free to hop over to our Submissions page.
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at FYE HQ when they dreamt up this one…
Having watched all of Breaking Bad during its original TV run, drawn my own Heisenberg shirt, and laughed at Breaking Bad Comics ’til they mineral-ed my socks off, I’m fascinated to see that the show’s legacy is still going so strong nearly six years after its fateful series finale. FYE, who have already released cereals based on Rugrats, anime, and modern American “children’s” horror games, have now set their sights on Albuquerque. Not unlike Walter White himself, this time around they’ve cut out the middleman between mouth and marshmallow, ridding their (admittedly expensive) cereals of any oat-y imperfections to make boxes of 100% pure “Blue Sky Crunchy Marshmallows.”
Dubious drug references aside, these mildly profane (put the kids to bed) marb*tches are apparently both naturally and artificially flavored. I still haven’t decided whether I’ll go in on a box—I promised Walt I’d stay out of his territory, after all, if he stayed out of the cereal blogging game—but I am curious to see what these might taste like. Bubblegum? Cotton Candy? Rice ‘n Beans?
If you’ve tried these, let me know in the comments below. In the meantime, I’ll just pray that the conceptual sequel to these Oops! All Lucky Charms Moons is a shingle-specked box full of Crunchy Roof Pizzas.
National Cereal Day is a funny holiday.
See, despite the best efforts of cereal curators and Ralston researchers such as myself, no one knows exactly when this crunchiest day of the year was first commemorated, nor who it was that first raised their (presumably) marble mug–bowl hybrid to propose the occasion. That said, if you’d like to pretend it was my Great Grand-Pappy Cerealously IV, a humble Crunch Berry farmer from the milkily humid tropics, I wouldn’t be opposed.
All we know is that since the day starting gaining mainstream traction near the turn of the 21st century, National Cereal Day has remained more popular amongst food and local news outlets than other, more contested days. Perhaps it’s a testament to the comparative cultural significance of breakfast cereal, or perhaps just to the PR power of big cereal companies—bless them all for stocking my pantry in time for National Napping Day next week.
Regardless of the date’s disputed origins, it almost always creeps up on me like a ghost in the night or the smotherly love of a 5am house cat. I tend to myself awakening in disbelief to “March 7th” on the calendar, scrambling past my plans for scrambled eggs to write something fitting for this blog’s bona fide breakfast star. But this year, my resolve was steely and my focus was clear: I simply had to write about the already-legendary Honey Brunches of Oats flavors Post has released to both celebrate National Cereal Day and potentially initiate a bold new phase of the foodstuff’s future:
A dawning golden-brown—and perhaps, eventually, honey-mustardy—era of savory cereal.
Both these bite-sized barn animals have already been spotted in both Giant Eagle and Walmart stores, but my journey from farm to pantry was more of an a-graze-ing race. The kind folks at Post offered to send me a box, but after a postal system error—during which I cursed imagined package thieves before pitying them for the surprisingly fowl bounty they were about to unbox—I had to leave a polite mailbox note and desperately wait to hear from a distant neighbor in hopes they’d still have what was mistakenly delivered to them.
Thankfully, this kind soul was able to recover my morning soul food, and here I sit: pastorally sampling the stuff to see if it’s cud worth chewing or a dud worth ptooey-ing.
