Tag Archives: general mills

Three of the Best Cereal Commercials on TV Now

Three of the Best Cereal Commercials Header

Cereal isn’t all about the sugary flakes and crunchy rings. It’s about the culture, too. Of course, since you’re reading a cereal blog, I probably don’t need to tell you that.

From the colorful characters to the mail-in premiums and games on the back of the box, there’s a good reason breakfast cereal has stood the test of time and become a full-on lifestyle for nostalgia-holics like me.

Growing up, my favorite part was always the TV commercials. Only on Saturday morning could you slurp down a bowl of Golden Grahams, binge watch Pokémon, then see a commercial about Toucan Sam’s deep sea adventures that makes you forget the Golden Grahams and inspires you tow your mother to the grocery store for a fresh box of Froot Loops that will fuel the exact same process the next weekend.

But as we grow older and start to substitute Cartoon Network with CNN and such, we see way fewer cereal commercials. I guess it’s hard to bookend Wolf Blitzer with Chip the Wolf.

That’s why I still purposely tune into Nickelodeon most mornings while I chomp down Raisin Bran Crunch or Cheerios. Aside from the sweet, sweet SpongeBob re-runs, I get to see that cereal commercials are still alive, well, and awesome.

Here are three of the best. Continue reading

Review: Annie’s Organic Frosted Oat Flakes Cereal

Annie's Frosted Oat Flakes Box

Easter may be over, but it isn’t too late to welcome a brand new hare into the mystical Brotherhood of Breakfast Bunnies.

It’s a pretty exclusive club, consisting of only the Trix Rabbit and Quicky from Nesquik Cereal. Despite his floppy ears, Count Chocula has been repeatedly denied membership.

No one knows what goes on in the BoBB, but we can only assume it involves cereal sphere chakras, milky meditation, and making fun of the Cadbury Bunny’s silly clucking. Now the Annie’s Bunny has joined their ranks, as Annie’s Homegrown has just released three new organic breakfast cereals: Cocoa Bunnies, Berry Bunnies, and Frosted Oat Flakes.

I had to try Frosted Oat Flakes first; since the other two rabbits have fruity and chocolatey cereals covered, Frosted Oat Flakes seemed like the freshest concept. If breakfast cereal were a fighting game, “Frosted Oat Flakes” would be the Annie’s Bunny’s signature finisher move. Continue reading

Catching Up on Cereal Time with Gabe Fonseca!

Put Netflix on pause, because w’ve got something better for you to binge watch than all 10 seasons of Friends for the third time this year.

See, it’s been a while since we visited cereal generalissimo Gabe Fonseca’s informative and nostalgic Cereal Time YouTube series. The show covers a different cereal each week, and it totally deserves to be nominated for a Tony award—a Tony the Tiger award, that is.

Speaking of which, the first of four videos we’d like to share with you features Gabe awarding his top ten cereals of all time. Unsurprisingly, there’s absolutely no overlap between Gabe’s list and my own list of favorite cereals. This is probably because of our age difference, but by viewing our two rankings, you can get a taste (well, at least a look. Lickable computer screens aren’t real yet, right?) of twenty different iconic cereals covering decades, if not centuries of colorful cereal history.

If nothing else, I do agree that Cap’n Crunch wins most iconic cereal mascot of all time. If the good Cap’n can defy physics and wear his eyebrows on his hat, he deserves to be #1 of something. Continue reading

Happy Star Wars Day! New Star Wars Cereal Boxes on the Way from General Mills

*Cue Star Wars opening credits crawl music*

It is a dark time for the Internet. Although Star Wars Day comes every year on May 4th, corporate Twitter accounts from Hostess to Little Caesars continue to nauseatingly repeat the exact same “May the Fourth be with you” joke all across Twitter and Facebook.

Bringing some substance to this dreaded unoriginality, a group of cereal freedom fighters led by General Mills plans to release two new Star Wars Cereal boxes onto cereal shelves, for the aesthetic betterment of pantries everywhere.

The whiny emo Kylo Ren, obsessed with angst and probably old Nirvana albums, graces one of the boxes, while the heroic Rey lights up the other in a dazzling blue that reminds a certain cereal blogger of those awesome Go-Gurt tubes released for the prequels…

For those keeping score at home, there are now exactly enough Star Wars Cereal variants for you to binge eat a different one while binge watching each Star Wars movie: Darth Vader, Yoda, a different Kylo Ren (with his lightsaber), BB-8, and R2-D2 round out the seven total boxes.

Good luck trying to “Catch ‘Em All!”

Whoops, wrong series.

Review: Limited Edition Strawberry Cheerios

IMG_4682

Strawberries.

Forget April showers, May flowers, and June TV re-runs of Austin Powers, because strawberries are the real harbingers of summertime.

Strawberries!

Whether it’s the rosy pink of an artificial strawberry or the screaming scarlet of the real thing, the color of strawberry related things is enough to make my blood run red. Oh, wait…it always does that.

Strawberries!

Even saying the name makes me want to suck down fruity beverages through a curly plastic tube while singing along to “Copacabana,” because nothing’s better than straws and Barry.

Now even Cheerios—one of the most iconic cereal brands out there—has embraced this hero of the season. With gluten-free Limited Edition Strawberry Cheerios, General Mills is once again bringing peace to the breakfast aisle after the tragic discontinuation of Strawberry Yogurt Burst Cheerios in 2013.

We also know that the bread and strawberry butter of General Mills’ strawberry cereal game is still to come with this summer’s Strawberry Tiny Toast, but let’s give Strawberry Cheerios their time in the oat ring-shaped spotlight. Hi ho, Cheerio: let’s-a go!

Continue reading

Review: Cocoa Puffs (Now With 50% More Real Cocoa)

IMG_4669

That’s a bold claim, Cocoa Puffs.

I mean, you could’ve just said “now with more chocolatey taste!” or called the cereal “SUPER Cocoa Puffs,” but you chose to drop some hard stats on us. Exactly 50% more cocoa, eh? Alright, if you say so: I better go 50% more cuckoo for these.

And trust me, I have a pretty refined Cocoa Puffs palate. Cocoa Puffs is one of the first cereals I can remember eating as a young’n. Back in my early grade school days, I ate a bowl every single morning until I got sick of ’em. One day, in fact, I tried a bowl of Cocoa Puffs with chocolate milk instead of regular milk and got quite literally sick, diagnosed with a condition that doctors could classify only as “Chocolardiac Arrest.”

But what didn’t kill me only made me stronger, and now my taste buds are braced and ready to be blown away by a choco-bombshell. Are you ready, Cocoa Puffs?

En garde!

Continue reading

News: Pumpkin Spice Cheerios Coming This Fall!

pumpkincheerios

Image Source: General Mills Inc.

(Update: I reviewed Pumpkin Spice Cheerios!)

This is not a drill! Red alert! Err…I mean…orange alert!

As part of their ongoing efforts to revitalize the Cheerios brand, General Mills just announced an autumn debut for Pumpkin Spice Cheerios.

Set to hit stores around Labor Day, Pumpkin Spice Cheerios will bring an iconic seasonal flavor—which has already hit lattes, toaster pastries, dish soap, and much more—to your breakfast bowl. Since General Mills is committed to removing artificial flavors from its cereals, I’m willing to bet that this cereal will be stuffed with real pumpkin, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and hopefully fan favorites cloves and allspice.

Of course, Pumpkin Spice Cheerios won’t be the first pumpkin cereal: Trader Joe’s Pumpkin O’s, Pumpkin Puffins, and Pumpkin Spice Frosted Mini-Wheats have already broken that farm-fresh ground. But since those three cereals are cinnamon-y, squash-y, and pumpkin pie-y (in that order), Pumpkin Spice Cheerios could still easily claim the title of most authentically spicy pumpkin spice cereal,

Between Pumpkin Spice and this summer’s Strawberry Cheerios, I’m excited for the “revival” of a cereal line that I never really considered to be “dying” to begin with.

Keep up the good work, Cheerios: as long as you’re around, I can get my O-shaped breakfast food fix without having to pour milk on my SpaghettiOs.

Cerealously Looks Back at Chex Quest!

chex1

Oh boy, this one really does take me back.

When I talk about moments that really got me into cereal—not just cereal as a food, but cereal as a culture, hobby, and lifestyle—my discovery of Chex Quest is always one of them.

It was one of those summer days when it’s hot enough to make the sky warble and the hot dogs melt right into their buns. I had sought refuge in my cool basement and was digging through a drawer of old CD-ROMs and floppy disks. I happened upon this disk:

chex2

Since most of the other CD-ROMs contained word processing software and Encarta encyclopedias, the technicolor cartoon art on Chex Quest magnetically held my eyes and imagination alike. I couldn’t wait to boot it up, and as soon as I did, I happily lost myself in a world of pixelated breakfast heroism. Continue reading