Allow me to preface this review with the disclaimer that I honestly have no idea if these Filled Bites will ever hit mainstream shelves. I first heard about these two cereals via the insider tip of a Hy-Vee worker at a Minneapolis location often used as a General Mills new product test store. Then I got these two boxes (with different artwork) from reader Ryan (thank you kindly!), but they also seem like samples. The artwork feels more finalized, but it’s just art on both sides, plus the box is a thinner cardboard than regular cereal boxes.

Plus plus, there’s a landing page out there for a possible Cinnamon Toast Crunch Filled Bites—which, while still apparently in its prototype stage would likely replace Pillsbury Cinnamon Roll here—as CTC no doubt has bigger brand clout with the kids today than portly/chortly ol’ Poppin’ Fresh. That guy lost the youth the minute the similarly glossy Hamburger Helper rhymed him outta relevancy.

Which is all to say that, ultimate widespread legitimacy of these Filled Bites aside, I feel a need to review them, if only to uphold the ephemeral legacy of Fillows—a decidedly dank and decadently dense cereal line that deserved way better.

Let’s start with Cinnamon Roll. It’s less interesting for two reasons: one, it already existed as a Fillows flavor; and two, to be completely honest with y’all, the recent ceaseless swirl of new Cinnamon Toast Crunch stuff has left me a little burnt out on cinnamon cereals.

But don’t get me wrong, as a cinnamon cereal, these Filled Bites are unique and tasty. They’re pretty much the same as their Fillows ancestors—though I’d say Filled Bites are larger in surface area, at the expense of being less densely crunchy—meaning they hit hard on the doughy & creamy icing elements of a cinnamon roll, much more so than any direct cinnamon-iness. In fact, this feels like an obscurely specific comparison, but the taste of this cereal is almost more like a heavily glazed monkey bread dessert than a cinnamon roll specifically.

Filled Bites are good dry or in milk, but I’d lean toward milk. The weight of the pieces mean they sink to the bottom of the bowl, allowing for more complete dairy saturation and subsequent compound creaminess.

All in all, not bad, but they don’t do too much to stand out in a crowded cinnamon cereal aisle. I also wonder if they’d change the recipe if these become CTC Filled Bites. As it stands, the Cinnamon Roll Filled Bites taste way more like their own distinct brand of cinnamon than is the Toast Crunch signature.

The Bottom Line: 7 games of Super Monkey Bread out of 10

Ok, on to the reason we’re all here (by “here” I mean my office, and by “we” I mean literally just me): Golden Grahams S’Mores Bites.

It’s no secret that I’m a Golden Grahamaniac, and I’ve been begging for so long for a new variant of GGs to hit shelves—we got so close with CinnaGraham Toast Crunch, but those crazy squares gobbled up the glory just like they chowed-down the Dough Boy.

So I really hope these S’Mores Filled Bites get released, because they’re genuinely very tasty. I can understand why they may not, though, because there are still some kinks to iron out here. Namely, the sedimentary situation.

Let me explain: when you first eat a Golden Grahams S’Mores Filled Bite, you’re basically just going to taste a creamy marshmallow sweetness coated by cocoa powder. It’s not until you eat several F. Bites that the treasured third s’mores component, the graham, starts to really build onto your palate. Like aggregating strata of silted sediment on a riverbed, the hearty golden sweetness layers on top of those aforementioned notes, which get richer and faintly fudgier by association. Milk, of course, only makes this more evident. Plus, the cumulative s’mores effect reminds me of one of my favorite, weirdly formative snacks: Ritz Bitz S’Mores, specifically the ones with Simpsons faces on them.

So yes, so long as you eat GG S’Mores Filled Bites at a steady, brisk-yet-contemplative pace, or otherwise just cram a whole gravelly mittful of them into your mouth at a time, you’re likely going to love the experience. This cereal ain’t for piecemeal pecking, I’ll tell ya that much.

Overall, I, as a Kirby-tier voracious cereal gobbler, love this stuff, hope it comes to stores everywhere, hope it marks a new Golden Age for my favorite miniature Grahams.

The Bottom Line: 9 Kelsey Grahammers (certified Golden Grahams fans) out of 10