There is beauty in simplicity. This is known.
Example: in the 200,000ish-person city where I live, despite dozens of renowned restaurants and artisan makers, perhaps my favorite menu item is a modest egg & cheddar on ciabatta sandwich. The ability to do so much with so few ingredients never fails to blow me away and make me scramble back for more. I mean, have you seen most sandwiches these days? Their menu descriptions are borderline biblical, with so much stuff stuffed within that it’s as hard to taste anything in particular as it is to eat the thing without it prolapsing prosciutto and quarts of aioli all over your hands.
But I digress. And wipe my fingers off.
I’ll admit, when it was first announced, Smartfood’s new Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries popcorn mix turned me off with its very concept. Sharp hulls and serrated Crunch Berries teaming up to shred my palate? My dental insurance is expensive enough. But now that I’ve actually got a chance to try the stuff, I’m happy to say that I was wrong, and Cap’n Crunch is a master of minimalistic munchies.
What initially appeared to be plain ol’ salted ‘n’ buttery popcorn with Crunch Berries strewn about turns out to be actual, berry-flavored popcorn…with Crunch Berries strewn about.
The catch is that the berry popcorn is pretty darn good. So much so that the Crunch Berries hardly have to do any heavy lifting to earn this light snack a worthy place in your beachside snack bag. When I brought it to the shores of Lake Michigan, all my friendly companions eyed the bag with hesitation, only to try the stuff and meekly, almost shamefully, admit, “okay, this stuff slaps (or some less savory version of the word).”
The berry popcorn is such a nice complement to the cereal pieces because it brings what Crunch Berries never has: real, detectable fruit flavor. Granted, it’s still a bit of an amalgamated fruit powder, but I got clear raspberry and blueberry vibes from it. Pair this with the tropically artificial bursts of Crunch Berry, and you get a unique intersection of fruity fact and fiction. Plus, there is a subtle sheen of butter and a light sprinkling of salt to only further enhance the unique juxtaposition of tastes here.
In fact, the more Smartfood x Cap’n Crunch popcorn I eat, the more it starts to taste like an alternate universe Monster Cereal. Sure, I’ve long chastised the Monsters line for swapping oat flour for corn-based ingredients, but maybe if Franken Berry and Boo Berry teamed up and ditched their chewy styrofoam ghost shapes for actual light and fluffy popcorn, they could be forgiven for their sins.
It’s not all sunshine and tasted rainbows with Smartfood’s Crunch Berry Popcorn. While the flavor powder does a pretty good job at softening the pieces’ palate impact, there’s a less expected tooth stumper here. Multiple times while eating it, I thought I was about to bite into a hard kernel, but it turned out to be a Crunch Berry. A pleasant surprise, but not as much fun when the opposite happens. Also, though this popcorn’s flavor is pretty memorable and delectable in its condensed sweetness, it still gets old after you’ve eaten a few servings of it.
That’s why I recommend Smartfood Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries popcorn, but mostly as a snack to share. I don’t envision myself going out to buy more of this—I’m more of a cheese popcorn man—but for a beach trip with a few people, it very weirdly and very specifically hits the spot. Just be sure you leave the milk at home.
The Bowl: Smartfood Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries Popcorn
The Breakdown: A lightly blessed mix of real and fake fruit flavors atop typical popcorn flavor that pleases a crowd more than it does a pantry.
The Bottom Line: 7 sudden seagull friends out of 10