(I cropped this one tall solely so you could see Benny’s head)

Do not read this review in the Alps.

Do not read this review while hunting or fishing.

And certainly do not read this review with any sleeping children in the house, because the seismic sigh I’m about to release could make avalanches, ripples, and crybaby dribbles:

*SIGH*

There, that feels better. Hopefully your pets haven’t been spooked and you weren’t in range of my sugar corn-scented breath—that stuff’s Gru-some. Heh, see what I did there? Just a little Despicable humor from Me.

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Please laugh with me. I need something positive to come out of this review. I’m going to keep it quick, because Minions Vanilla Vibe is just an awful, terrible cereal. And no, I’m not saying that in the classic dad joke sense of “oh, these taste horrible! I’ll get rid of ’em for you.” No, Minions Vanilla Vibe cereal—pardon my crudeness here—sucks. From both a flavorful and ideological point of view. Allow me to (briefly) elaborate:

Vanilla, birthday cake, confetti cupcake: call it whatever you want, but this cereal blogger believes such simply sugarcoated flavors don’t belong in a modern breakfast aisle. And while yes, there are exceptions, they are exceptional because they take great care to retain doughy nuance with better ingredients and taste distribution. Oh, not to mention how adding marshmallows—especially boring circular ones—is not a one-size-fits-all Band-Aid for fixing an already weak cereal.

Because you’d need a marathon-length (and width) roll of gauze to make Vanilla Vibe presentable. The corn spheres making up the bulk of this stuff are super sticky and generically sweet, tasting like highly processed sweet corn and not much else. Sure, you could probably tease out a little hypothetical vanilla, but it isn’t exactly a toothsome vanilla and instead feels like a test tube vanilla bean-ie baby that hasn’t finished gestating yet.

If you want vanilla flavoring in this (or any) cereal, you’re much better off just buying vanilla almond milk, oat milk or otherwise to thoroughly infuse any taste with a little more vanil-love. Not to say that milk redeems Minions Vanilla Vibe in any sense—rather, it just further highlights how these puffs are hollow husks of flavorlessness with ho-hum marbits scattered conservatively throughout.

Perhaps in some sense, this is the perfect cereal analogy for the Minions franchise, which has likewise been milked as a tepid cash grab doused in saccharine meaninglessness. Certainly a far cry from the first Minions cereal, which was perhaps too innovatively delicious for its own good. General Mills can’t keep making good cereals like that: don’t you know good cereals cost money?!

I’ve already given Minions Vanilla Vibe more of my cognitive effort than its creators did, so I’ll sum it up succinctly: Minions Vanilla Vibe does not taste good. It tastes like slimy sugar, serrated corn and industrial cereal runoff. Avoid it at all costs—if your child demands a Minions breakfast product, slice up a banana into a bowl of Crunch Berries and call it Gru-ps, All Berries!

Anything less would be insulting their intelligence.

The Bowl: Minions Vanilla Vibe Cereal

The Breakdown: The latest in a long line of corporate-bottom-line-pleasing cereal byproducts, this MVV deserves every bit of earnest mockery it gets. Why wade and wallow through over-sweetened, over-dyed fluff puffs when there’s a whole world of satisfying cereals out there? You deserve better.

The Bottom Line: 1 emphatic cry of “I’m sick of this” out of 10

(Quick Nutrition Facts: calories, grams of sugar, grams of fiber, & grams of protein per serving)

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