(Note: the box got a just a little dinged during its journey North. Must’ve been hungry carrier pigeons.)

Look, are we all just going to ignore the fact that, before Tropical Froot Loops, Toucan Sam clearly had no idea what fruit is?

And I’m not talking the layperson’s misclassification of pumpkins and tomatoes as vegetables—follow your nose deep into your noggin and try to remember the last time you heard Froot Loops’ lifelong spokesbird actually reference a real fruit by name. Lemonberries, starberries, wildberries: all ambiguous amalgamations of nature’s genuine bounty invented to hide the fact that “Froot” is much less of a natural flavor than it is a state of mind kids can tastefully chase outside the bounds of reality and into whichever adjacent universe where the grass is limeberry green and the fruit salads are crunchy.

[Though to Sam’s credit, his original iteration did wear a fruit-flocked Carmen Miranda hat. My two-pronged rebuttal to this is a) toucans can’t pass the mirror test, so he’s likely never recognized his own headgear, and b) the first Toucan Sam was undoubtedly throttled by the current Toucan Sam’s slenderly feathered man fingers.]

Thankfully, Froot Loops in Mexico largely preserve the two-dimensional Toucan Sam design of yore, though the worryingly articulate prehensility with which he’s gripping the Tropical Froot Loop on this box still leaves me concerned he’ll snap—or at least snap half the universe away.

MX-clusive Tropical Froot Loops boldly bucks the brand’s trend by directly naming four fruit flavors we’ll be able to taste inside: pineapple, banana, mango, and orange. And while I’d say the cereal doesn’t reach 100% compliance with that promise, these are still by far the best Froot Loops since, well, 1963’s critically acclaimed Froot Loops.

See, I like to think if I have a knack for anything when it comes to reviewing snacks, it’s drawing obscurely specific comparisons to other treats from my own sprawling bestiary of once-devoured delights. Usually the flavor ghosts of carbohydrates past dance around my taste buds, forcing me to eat ridiculous quantities before confirming the taste analogue (or at least that’s the excuse I use at the doctor’s office).

But Tropical Froot Loops were easy to identify from the very first bite: this is pretty much Haribo Gummy Bears Cereal, and it does a far more masterful job of translating gelatinous goodness into something digestible at breakfast time than Sour Patch Kids Cereal. This is all thanks to Kellogg’s of Mexico’s landmark interpretation of a clear gummy bear’s uniquely artificial pineapple flavoring. The fruity profile of SpongeBob’s drywall rarely gets play in the cereal aisle, perhaps because of its overwhelming potency and ultimately niche appeal when compared even to other flavors in Tropical Froot Loops, but the tempered pineapple tasted here is neither too puckeringly sweet nor nearly as syrupy as the lifeblood one might suckle out of a Dole Fruit Cup.

Rather, this pineapple is grounded in more neutral pectin undertones, helping it play nice with the other dominant notes in Tropical Froot Loops: orange and banana, who arrive chronologically after pineapple palms you in the tongue with its alluring aloha. Bright twangs of playful tangerine sweetness give each spoonful of Tropical Froot Loops greater dimension to its sweetness profile, while subdued notes of slightly browned banana give your mouth’s cereal vacation a genuine, first-class flight home. Conspicuously missing is any semblance of mango, who I can only assume would be the zany uncle of this sitcom’s exotic beachfront journey—you know, the one who gets left behind in a local prison for playing coconut bongoes too loud or covering the entirety of Isle Delfino in poisonous paint.

Oh, that portly Uncle Mario.

Man-goners aside, any given handful of Tropical Froot Loops is an ambrosial delight of nostalgic gummy flavors reimagined with a veneer of more neutral sweetness to help it pair naturally with milk. Comparing milked ‘n’ fruity cereals to smoothies has been my go-to cop-out metaphor for some time, but I may have to retire it after today, because when Tropical Froot Loops hit dairy, the result is nothing short of a gourmet Jell-O Salad dumped into a blender.

I believe at Tropical Smoothie Cafe, they call that the “Wham, Bam, Thank You Sam.”

It’s quite the shame that such a wonderful variety of Froot Loops likely won’t make it to U.S. shelves—after all, the colorings used for Tropical Froot Loops hardly look like they were condensed from a leaky neon sign. With a titillating trio of tastes that play elegantly off each other’s strengths and shortcomings, this is perhaps the most creative use of fruit flavoring I’ve tasted since That One Cereal Featuring The Yellow Tic-Tacs Who Must Not Be Named, and it’s packed with enough summertime sweetness to trick your mouth into thinking it’s at Cancún—without the travel costs and with cereal dust between your toes instead of sand.

Wait, I wasn’t actually supposed to smoothie-fy this stuff, wine style?

If you want to import a Tropical Froot Loops box of your own, bookmark Mexican Candy Lady’s store. The stuff is out of stock as of this writing, but I managed to snag mine when she restocked. My sincerest thanks to Mexican Candy Lady for all that she does for wanderlusting foodies across the world—if I could ship a thank-you Jello-O salad in return without incurring the financial and biohazardous suspicions of the United States Postal Service, I would.

The Bowl: Tropical Froot Loops (Mexico)

The Breakdown: An innovative infusion of three rare cereal fruits, these Froot Loops nail a sweetness-to-neutral-base ratio to produce something that’s a yummy, gummy passport for your tummy.

The Bottom Line: 9 creepily cracking Toucan knuckles out of 10