Tag Archives: general mills

Spooned & Spotted: 2017 Monster Cereals!

https://www.instagram.com/p/BXV4q44Dk0l/?taken-by=cantbear2livewithoutit

And just like that, the residual sweat of summer’s dog days has been wicked away, replaced with the foaming spittle of Halloween’s werewolf days.

Early August has long meant the resurrection of Count Chocula, Franken Berry, and Boo Berry, but even when I know it’s coming, I still get giddy when I see those pointy teeth, head valves, and that little porkpie hat. They’re the edible harbingers of an entire spookily delicious time of the year—the literal breakfasts of Halloween’s eating season, if you will.

Instagram user @cantbear2livewithoutit has the enviable honor of being 2017’s first successful Monster hunter, having found the trio at a Foodworld store, though General Mills has confirmed that the cereals have shipped everywhere as of late July.

As far as themes go, the Three Muske-Fears here have scaled back from their grandiose 2016 election campaign. Despite getting points for effort, the online voting process was riddled with bugs and miscommunication, while consumers in general were a little too election-fatigued to be thrilled by a Transylvanian one (it was clear within a week that the Count’s name recognition would be unbeatable).

This year, Count Chocula, Franken Berry, and Boo Berry’s cereal box artwork simply puts a new perspective on 2015’s augmented reality boxes—but they add the novel idea of monster marshmallows! It’s a simply concept, but a refreshingly innocent one. Count Chocula keeps his iconic, cocoa-swirled bat marbits, but Franken Berry gets his lumpy head turned into sugar nuggets, while Boo Berry’s box is filled with sweet used napkins.

I mean sheet ghosts—sheet ghosts! Please don’t haunt me, ghost of Pete Lorre.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BXXqKKED7HP/?taken-by=cantbear2livewithoutit

Can’tBEAR2livewithoutit was also kind enough to share the back of the box art. While the past few years have at least included cameos by cult favorite monster cereals Frute Brute and Yummy Mummy, it seems like this year they’re well and truly sleeping in their respective doghouse and pyramid. Instead, we get a suite of monster cereal cosplays from a bunch of other General Mills cereal mascots—and the Pillsbury Doughboy.

I love the idea of other food characters hanging out like some giant crossover episode, and I heartily hope that the Doughboy gets his own zombie-themed Pillsburied Alive monster cereal next year.

Until then, I’ll be hunting these boxes for a more comprehensive breakdown. Until then, our thanks go again to Can’tBEAR2livewithoutit for sharing the photo. Wanna see your own find in a Spooned & Spotted post? We’d love to see your latest breakfast haul, discovery, or feast: send it over on our Submissions page.

Spooned & Spotted (Canada): Oatmeal Crisp Apple Crisp Cereal

Apple Crisp Oatmeal Crisp Cereal

Oatmeal Crisp is a strange and wonderful beast, and it’s quietly getting a new Apple Crisp variety—in Canada only.

Traditionally lumped with Basic 4 and Raisin Nut Bran in the odd pantheon of “General Mills Cereals That Are Really But No One Talks About Them,” Oatmeal Crisp is a decadent cereal featuring toasted oatmeal flakes glazed with sugar syrup, paired with almond slivers and granola clusters.

So it’s pretty much normal oatmeal, just made more crunchy, less microwaveable, and with about a thousand more delicious calories per oatmeal-imeter.

Given my love for toasted oatmeal cereals, I’m personally embarrassed that haven’t geeked out about it more. As punishment, I’ll accept execution by way of conveyor belt-induced mass Oatmeal Crisp ingestion.

Canada’s newest Apple Crisp Oatmeal Crisp variety, discovered and kindly shared by our friend Junk Food Jeff, excitingly pairs the not-so-iconic cereal with the apple-cinnamon taste (and homely thatched charm) of a homemade apple pie, apple streusel, or apple slice topped with cinnamon and butter and microwaved for 12 seconds because I’m too poor to bake, okay Grandma?

Meanwhile, America has only seen regular Almond and Hearty Raisin Oatmeal Crisp in the past decade or so. I tried to more thoroughly research Oatmeal Crisp’s past American flavors, but this cult favorite is so elusive that online cereal historians can’t come to a consensus. The cereal’s Wikipedia page also name-drops Triple Berry, Apple Brown Sugar, Maple Nut, and Vanilla Yogurt as past, oddly specific flavors, while trusted resource Mr. Breakfast only names Maple Brown Sugar in addition to the mainstays.

Whatever Oatmeal Crisp’s true past contains (perhaps we once briefly overlapped with a parallel universe where Oatmeal Crisp is a currency), I’m just excited that its shelf presence isn’t petering out here in the 21st century. As Basic 4 and Raisin Nut Bran feel like they’re becoming modern relics, one of them has to survive and speak on behalf of weird cereals everywhere.

As a cereal weirdo myself, I thank Oatmeal Crisp for being my Lorax.

Our thanks again to Junk Food Jeff for sharing the photo. Wanna see your own find in a Spooned & Spotted post? We’d love to see your latest breakfast haul, discovery, or feast: send it over on our Submissions page.

News: Banana Nut Cheerios Cereal is Returning for 2017!

Banana Nut Cheerios

(Image via General Mills. Note: this is an old box photo, as the new one hasn’t been released yet.)

It would be so, so easy to make a “going nuts” joke to open this review, but that would be too easy. I’ll hold off, because I know it would make you all go bananas.

Whoops.

But whichever gastronomical idiom you use to express your excitement, there’s plenty to be giddy about. Even after gifting us delicious new apple cinnamon and mocha cereals, as well as the sure-to-be-delicious-because-c’mon-just-look-at-them Cinnamon Toast Crunch Bites doughnut holes, General Mills is treating cereal fans like spoiled grandkids once more by bringing back Banana Nut Cheerios, a fan-favorite variety that lasted from 2009 until late 2015.

Thanks to a tip from our friend Steffen (who has a great site about foreign cereals, if you have a translator ready), the above press release confirmed that the cult favorite Cheerios were returning to shelves.

We love you, Grandma Mills: you always did make the best banana bread.

Which is interesting, because while banana nut and banana bread are similara flavors, I don’t consider them exactly the same. It will be fun to see (and taste) whether the revival of Banana Nut Cheerios is exactly the same as before, or if it draws inspiration from Canada’s delightfully dense and ripe Banana Bread Shreddies.

Or maybe they’ll just subvert all expectations and make them taste like a peanut butter banana sandwich. Speaking of which…hey General Mills, people did love your discontinued Peanut Butter Cheerios. Hint hint, wink wink, nudge nudge.

Tribute Review: Neopets Islandberry Crunch Cereal (2006)

Neopets Islandberry Crunch Cereal Box 2006

Today is Cerealously’s second birthday, marking 731 days to the day since I decided to share my odd Oreo O’s obsession and weird Waffle Crisp compulsion with all of you dear readers who for some reason put up with me.

But instead of filling this post with sentimental blubber (though there might be time for that after 1200 words of blubbering about Kacheeks), I instead wanted to celebrate by sharing a piece of cereal history that’s very important to me: Neopets Islandberry Crunch cereal! Remembered by few and remembered as good by far fewer, this 2006 General Mills cereal paired the virtual pet franchise with purple and maroon puffs flavored like mixed berries.

Since licensed cereals are a dime a baker’s dozen, I’ll have to do a little time traveling deep into the foreboding fathoms of my own memory to explain Islandberry Crunch’s significance. Fasten your seatbelt, friends: even Wonka’s boat ride couldn’t get this bizarre.

(If you just want to see the cereal, keep scrolling ’til you see mummified corn spheres.) Continue reading

Review: Cocoa Puffs Ice Cream Scoops Cereal

Neapolitan Cocoa Puffs Ice Cream Scoops Cereal Review – Box

Neapolitan ice cream is criminally underrated. I mean, it combines the three most popular ice cream flavors (though I still can’t fathom how plain ol’ vanilla is more popular than Chocozuma’s Revenge, Chocolardiac Arrest, or any of those other “X-Treme Ice Creamz”) into one—sometimes even in snowman form—and we still hardly see it appear in things other than ice cream. Heck, even Naples itself has a flag that looks more like Superman ice cream than neapolitan’s iconic pink, brown, and creme.

And before these new neapolitan Cocoa Puffs Ice Cream Scoops, there has been only one other neapolitan cereal—and it was only released in New Zealand. I guess America will have to make the first kiwi cereal as revenge.

But enough melty melancholia. Let’s see if these strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate Cocoa Puffs are good enough to turn my local Baskin-Robbins’ 31 flavors into 401k. Continue reading

Review: Mocha Crunch Cereal

General Mills Mocha Crunch Cereal Review - Box

I’m a coffee snob. There, I said it, since you were going to find out anyway.

Yeah, I’m the guy who lets creamer expire, who recoils upon hearing the word “Frappuccino” like it was a different F-word, and who orders small black coffees at McDonald’s while in quiet camaraderie at all the old guys who used their senior coffee discount to do the same. Perhaps it speaks to the bitterness of my heart, but I like my coffee potent and sugarless, with names that are hard to pronounce and pretentious flavor notes like elderberry or toasted marshmallow that don’t actually exist and were probably drawn out of a hat by a mischievous barista.

So while I can’t remember the last mocha I’ve drank, hearing about General Mills’s new Mocha Crunch Cereal still left me giddy (although that might’ve been residual caffeine). The online-only Coffee Cereal has the beaned and bitter cereal market cornered, so I was ready to welcome a sugary chocolate coffee cereal into my life with open arms that are holding hot coffee mugs so you probably shouldn’t hug me. Sorry, Mocha Crunch.

Now the cereal’s here, and a single whiff of the bag’s medium-roasted cappuccino scent has me convinced good things are brewing. No need to wait for it to cool: let’s dive in.  Continue reading

Review: Burger King Lucky Charms Shake

Burger King Lucky Charms Shake Review Cereal

Which Lucky Charms marshmallow is your favorite? Is it the mashed-up blue chunk? The pureéd orange bit? Ooh, or is it the pulverized pink smithereen? I love that one.

Well no matter which iconic Lucky Charms marbit you fancy, you’ll totally be able to recognize it in Burger King’s brand new Lucky Charms Shake. This cereal milkshake is an iridescent cylinder of rainbow-specked vanilla soft serve that’s blended with real Lucky Charms shrapnel and a secretive marshmallowy cereal syrup so rich with Lucky Charms flavor that whichever cow the ice cream came from is now shouting “It’s moo-gically delicious!” via an unseen telepathic stimulus.

Or at least, that’s my poetic interpretation of how Burger King describes its Lucky Charms Shake. It’ll take a serious taste test to see if the shake lives up to its namesake cereal’s legacy, and as someone who sucks at just about everything, I feel qualified to suck this breakfast–dessert hybrid down in the name of journalism. Continue reading

Review: Cascadian Farm Organic Vanilla Chia Crunch Cereal

Cascadian Farm Organic Vanilla Chia Crunch Cereal Review Box

Apparently Cascadian Farm is a real farm, but I refuse to learn anything about it. Instead, I want to preserve my fantastical mental image of Cascadian Farm as a quaint rural community where busier General Mills cereals like Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Golden Grahams go to escape the city’s sugar-addled hustle and bustle, settle down, and become tamer versions of themselves, with no-nonsense names like Cinnamon Crunch and Graham Crunch.

Yes, the Cascadian Farm of my imagination is pretty much a breakfast parody of Harvest Moon, and I’d like to keep it that way.

Now the newest citizen in Cascadian Farm’s Wholesome Good-Time Barnyard Bayou (my mental name, not theirs) isn’t a direct derivation of another General Mills product. But it does remind me of Kashi’s recent Plant Power Vanilla Pepita Clusters, which is why I took note and lovingly planted Vanilla Chia Crunch into my grocery store cart like a transplanted chia plant. I just wrote the word plant in that sentence more times than I have cumulatively since 2008.

Kashi’s take on vanilla ‘n’ seeds tasted like cupcake-frosted popcorn. Let’s see if the Animal Crossing of cereal brands can be just as memorable. Continue reading