Now is the winter of our choco-mint made flower-ish summer by this rounded fork!

…oh, sorry, I’ve just been brushing up on the Bard of Breakfast, William Shakespoon. With Kellogg’s banking on a shift toward summery flavors for 2019, it makes sense to prepare now for what’s shaping up to be a very good year for lovers of fruity cereal and cereal-adjacent products. This marks a pretty drastic turn after years of mostly earthy flavors, like chocolate, peanut, almond, and even coffee.

Speaking of which, remember that time (read: a couple of months ago) when they dropped Vanilla Latte Mini-Wheats? That was an unexpected star of the year for me, and now sits in regular rotation on my countertop. So my hopes were high upon spotting a box of the new Frosted Mini-Wheats Fruit Medley in the wild.

Mid-winter is a strange time to release such a bright box, but I presume it’s just Fruit Medley’s allusion to a classic Christmas melody. You know: “…and a cardboard in a pear tree?”

If you think your cringe at that one was bad, you should have seen my neighbors while I took the photo. They kept King Lear-ing at me.

Yep.

Enough with the punnery, though. Let’s turn this winter tale into a mid-summer night’s creamsicle.

The most notable feature of these biscuits is the aroma. With the box art promising a blend of apple, pear, and peach, I anticipated something subdued and a bit on the natural side. Instead, it’s the unmistakable scent of Juicy Fruit. The upfront is a powerful shot of syrupy sweet, with just the faintest hint of apple at the end, if you really try. It’s the scent of fresh-picked plastic fruit. Could this be the first act foreshadowing the impending Sour Patch Kids cereal? Only time will tell, but for this bowl, I have to back up and realign my taste buds for artificial rather than au naturale. OK, think purple. Purple is a fruit.

Dry, these munchy mounds of whole wheat are exactly what we’ve come to expect of the brand. Any moisture is greedily sucked up like Birdo taking the cinnamon challenge. And the flavor?

That’s not a rhetorical question. I want to know where it’s gone. Vanilla Latte Mini-Wheats have a strong latte flavor. Chocolate Mini-Wheats have a distinct cocoa smack. Yet Fruit Medley Mini-Wheats have only the faintest hint of fruit candy-ness, and then just in the frosting. It’s as if an expired Laffy Taffy had been sitting in a bag of unfrosted Mini-Wheats on a hot day, thereby imbuing them with some small bit of its essence. Perhaps milk can turn this bowl around in its second act.

Sadly, the best thing about throwing milk at these ill-executed Gummy Bear Biscuits (my idea for a fruit-in-the-middle variety with an actual gummy bear at the core) is that it washes away anything resembling flavor. Like a Smash Bros. character losing the temporary invincibility of a star, Fruit Medley Mini-Wheats return to their original, regular Frosted Mini-Wheats state with even the slightest dunking.

The difference between a comedy and a tragedy is that someone dies, and the same can be said of experimental cereals. It was a nice idea, Kellogg’s, but this one just needs to go. I could commend a good effort with an off flavor, but there really isn’t any of which to speak. Even died-in-the-grain fruit cereal fans will likely be let down here. So while all’s well that ends well, I’d sooner Bitus And-don’t-icus.

The Bowl: Frosted Mini-Wheats Fruit Medley

The Breakdown: Dreams of peaches-and-cream dashed, this promising title is really munch ado about boring.

The Bottom Line: 4 goats and monkeys out of 10