Why waste time eating many small things when one big thing does the trick?

Such is the philosophy that has plagued cereal sales for the past decade—and for understandable reasons: breakfast as a temporally restricted concept is not what it used to be. For me, entering a workday with belly bloated rarely sounds appealing, especially since I’ve optimized my morning routine to essentially get me from bed to door in thoughtless, uninterruptible, and Rube-Goldbergian fashion. And clearly I’m not alone, as cereal companies have scrambled like diner eggs to adapt classic flavors for on-the-go breakfasting, while rebranding cereal itself as the midnight snack it was always destined to be.

But while concepts like breakfast shakes and mobile cereal receptacles are comparatively recent innovations, the world of cereal bars has largely eschewed architectural change, in favor of the tried and true “cereal bits bound by sweet-cream glue and shaped into crude rectangles” approach. Though I will say that in the case of General Mills bars, like these *new* Honey Nut Cheerios Treats, they’ve been getting smaller and lighter when compared to certain sugary bricks of yore (that can still apparently be bought, albeit only in cafeteria-friendly quantities).

I deeply enjoyed those aforementioned Honey Nut Cheerios “Milk ‘n Cereal Bars”—even if the freeze-dried milk sandwiched in the middle could practically be repurposed as sticky tack—so I’m interested to see how 2020’s slimmed-down take on America’s favorite cereal compares. Continue reading →