Beans have grown too powerful.

What started as a jovial musical fruit has now convinced all of society that it’s cool, and its positive public opinion rises with every pet name given, Starbucks opened, and Rowan Atkinson’d.

The collective legume’s luster has even bloomed into cereal, like Kashi By Kids’ new, trilogy-completing flavor: Coco Crisp. It’s not the first of its kind to be made out of bean ingredients, in Kashi’s case chickpea flour (which is leeching popularity off chicks and peas), but Cocoa Crisp promises a bold pairing of chocolate pucks and chocolate-stuffed chocolate-flavored pillows.

This sounds like one worth having a spoonful of peanut butter on hand for, but since I forgot to buy more peanut butter, I’ll just dive in with two spoons instead.

I think there’s a reason why Cocoa Crisp’s name sounds so familiar—beyond the obvious Cocoa Krispies sound-alike, this cereal is also named after one half of both Cocoa Puffs and Cookie Crisp. Which is a convenient analogy, because the likewise very starchy cocoa disks in Kashi’s Kids’ creation have a chocolatiness rating somewhere between Chip the Wolf’s occasional cocoa bursts and Sonny the Cuckoo’s well-saturated cocoa butter corniness.

So the unscientifically guesstimated 55% cacao flavor has a semisweet appeal, but it’s marred by the lingering bitterness left behind by the beany taste of the cereal’s core puff.

It’s like that time I spilled chocolate milk on my Beanie Baby: worth crying over.

But Cocoa Crisp’s potential isn’t entirely negated. When you do get some squares, they do a better job of balancing potently creamy milk chocolate bursts with a thinner, yet hardier bean wafer crust. Obviously I wish there were more of these pieces to tame the rolling sea of choc-peas, but I’ll instead see this as a blank canvas for me to mix Krave into later.

I wish I hadn’t spilled all that chocolate milk earlier.

But the good news is I still have normal milk, and it makes Kashi by Kids Cocoa Crisp Cereal a good deal better, as it allows for free diffusion of chocolate and bean flavor, diluting it overall with (varying levels of) fattiness and sweetness. The bean-tinged endmilk left behind isn’t quite as appealing as you’d expect from a classic, General Mills-level milk murker, but it gets the sweet sippin’ job done all the same.

Overall, I think Cocoa Crisp just barely makes it up there with Kashi’s other two ‘by Kids flavors, as those two usually did a better job of balancing their twin savory-sugary flavor palettes. I’d say it’s a good fibrous chocolate cereal mix-up, and a creative mix-in for other less-cacao-y chocolate cereals, but probably not a cho-co go-to.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with a jar of peanut butter and a gallon of chocolate milk.

The Bowl: Kashi by Kids Cocoa Crisp Cereal

The Breakdown: Equal parts tempting dark chocolate and testing legume influences, this cereal requires pillow-hoarding and milk-storming to be worth it.

The Bottom Line: 6.5 brown-spotted Beanie Baby cows out of 10