Sure, Dr. Robotnik might be smart in the 2020 Valentine’s Day box office darling Sonic the Hedgehog, but can he see why caffeine-addicted young adults love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch Coffee Creamer?
It’s got cinnamon sugar swirls in every swig: it’s the taste that can seep!
Jokes and flossing hedgehogs aside, something’s been messing with my brain: the fact that we’ve gotten more semifluid additions to the Toast Crunch family lately than we have crunchable cereals.
Coupled with Malt-O-Meal’s successful reintroduction of Blueberry Muffin Toasters, this leaves me wondering whether Cinnamon Toast Crunch, ostensibly one of cereal’s most iconic names, is stagnating as a brand. I mean, the last Toast Crunch we got was just the same thing cylinderized! Where’s the return of Peanut Butter Toast Crunch? Where’s the PB&J sequel to Peanut Butter Toast Crunch I just thought of? And the trilogy-closing Elvis Toast Crunch that many critics would call “breakfast’s most cinematic feat”?
Sorry, I might just be jaded and jittery thanks to this taste test. I promise I’m not dismissing Coffee Mate’s new Cinnamon Toast Crunch Coffee Creamer before the review even starts—I’m just a mildly lactose intolerant cereal blogger who wants to get back to his oat milk.
Cinnamon Toast Crunch flavored anything has to fight an uphill battle by design. Unless CTC is entering never before swirled territory, it has to distinctly prove that it is Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cereal flavored, rather than just another cinnamon-sugared variant. Not only does Coffee Mate already have a Cinnamon Vanilla Crème flavor, but International Delight’s eye-catching Cinnabon Coffee Creamer has been popular enough to stay on shelves for some time now.
What can Cinnamon Toast Crunch Coffee Creamer do differently?
Not much, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’d be hard-pressed to blindly pick Cinnamon Toast Crunch out of a spiced lactose litter, but there is certainly nuance to be detected here—if you’re the kind of person who swishes raw coffee creamer around in their mouth like a wine taster. Since this creamer’s flavor is diluted by nature, you’re gonna taste cinnamon, sugar, and coffee in a pretty even three-way distribution of palate-impacting density.
Should you stretch your taste buds to their limit (not recommended without a spotter), there are whiffs of browned & buttery vanilla. These notes sort of build up in the coffee’s aftertaste, so after a full mug you’re more likely to feel as if you’d briefly gargled actual Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal milk.
Having learned from my sinister CTC Smoothie mistake, I only garnished my creamer-infused coffee with real cereal pieces. And despite its beautiful plating/bowling, this too is a bad idea, as coffee soggens cereal far faster than a yogurt confection, capsizing my flimsy squares and melting them back into humus.
Overall, Cinnamon Toast Crunch coffee creamer is worth trying if you already know that you’ll be able to happily finish a giant bottle of cinnamon sugar coffee creamer before it goes bad. I would say ‘curb your expectations’ if seeking a thoroughly cereal’d experience, but I can’t imagine many people would hope for more than this. It’s tasty and gets the job done.
Which, in my case, is a job in the intestinal jackhammering industry.
The Bowl: Cinnamon Toast Crunch Coffee Creamer
The Breakdown: Little more than ‘just another cinnamon sugar coffee creamer,’ this creamer’s faint notes of smelted butter and vanilla aren’t quite potent enough to stir the pot in its genre. Still less sweet than the Smoothies, though!
The Bottom Line: 6.5 Creamy vs. Crunchy lightsaber duels out of 10