Falafel and honey.

Hummus and chocolate sauce.

Chana masala and marshmallow fluff.

As you can obviously tell by these obviously real and totally classic flavor combos, pairing chickpeas with sweet flavor is a totally normal and not eyebrow-raising thing to do. I mean, why else would Trader Joe’s make a chickpea, corn, and rice flour cereal flavored with maple syrup? People have definitely probably maybe been roasting garbanzo beans in whipped cream for centuries!

In all seriousness, once you get over the novelty of this psyllium-rich, gluten-free cereal’s ingredients, the more baffling question is: why ladders? Trader Joe’s site poses this explanation:

“Does every morning feel like an uphill climb? Is breakfast a bore, a chore, or—worse—a battle? We hear you. In fact, we’ve been there. So, to help make that sluggish, uphill climb feel more like a victorious ascent, we’ve created another great breakfast cereal.”

But that seems like a stretch to me. If they wanted to make a cereal shaped like something morning-friendly, they could have make crunchy coffee cups, chewy snooze alarms, or crispy traffic-free commutes. But no, instead we have these ladders, which look like modernized Graham Crackos that migrated to Canada.* As a certified maple fanatic who is seriously considering a French Toast Crunch tattoo, I’m ready to see if these ladders can climb up to my lofty standards.

One munch reveals that Crunchy Maple Ladders are more like Crunchy Wooden Step Stools (not just because they have a lot of fiber). Reminding me of stale Waffle Crisp, the base flavor of each ladder is a nearly overbearingly bland combo of earthiness and cardboard. They’re certainly crunchy, like any good ladder would be, but their tri-flour formula isn’t nearly sweet enough and is closer to a savory oyster cracker or soft tortilla.

Maybe an assembly line switch-up at Trader Julius’ Mediterranean factory accidentally used ground-up pita bread instead of chickpeas.

The light maple glaze doesn’t help matters, either. It’s very tough to even detect, and even though Crunchy Maple Ladders may be flavored with real maple syrup, the faint sticky sweetness on each piece tastes more like a generic golden sugar syrup, or perhaps diluted honey, than the amber tree goo we know and love. I highly recommend drizzling more maple syrup on top, baking crumbs of this stuff into pancake batter, or infusing it with a syringe of Waffle Crisp endmilk before eating.

Speaking of milk, it helps sweeten up this hard-to-enjoy hardware, though it doesn’t give it more maple flavor. Instead, milk enriches the boring base flavor with creamy goodness. The result is something somewhat cookie-like. In fact, Crunchy Maple Ladders in milk reminds me of the Fortune Cookie Cereal I’ve always dreamed about, albeit fortune cookies that kind of taste like the paper fortunes inside of them.

In my mind, they read “good things come to those who keep their beans away from their breakfast cereal.”

All in all, milk may help, but it can’t save this aggressively healthy cereal, whose nutritious ambitions end up making me feel more like a beaver eating it than a bodybuilder. Word to the wise, Joe: when breakfast is “a bore,” don’t fight fire with snooze-worthy fire.

Because syrup puts out fires better than wood.

The Bowl: Trader Joe’s Crunchy Maple Ladders

The Breakdown: More balsa than breakfast, these bean-powered ladders simply don’t pack enough of a maple punch. If you must try them, use milk to ensure fortune cookie-esque fortification.

The Bottom Line: 4 chocolate chip frijoles out of 10

*I’ve been told that Crunchy Maple Ladders are actually very likely repacked Maple Crunch, a cereal from Freedom Foods that I’ve never tried and now probably never will.