(Images via Kellogg’s)
Whether your stomach’s half full or half empty, there’s always more room to fill it with full-filling cupcakes. But if you’d rather circumvent common cupped and caked frustrations (why are my hands so oily? where do I put this damp, crumb-covered liner? why have we as a culture recognized Funfetti’s flavorlessly sweetened sovereignty?), then there are about to be two new and newly returned Pop-Tarts that’ll make your morning dessert a little less messy. Continue reading
(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. Continue reading
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For a guy who’s spent his entire 56-year career preaching the Gospel of Froot, Toucan Sam has rarely explored the complex taste spectrum the broad pantheon of seed-dispersal vessels (aka fruit) has to offer.
And he still hasn’t canonized the late Carmen Miranda yet either, so I refuse to acknowledge his scripture’s legitimacy over the Dead Trix Scrolls.
Sure, we’ve gotten smoothie-fied Froot Loops, Wild Berry Froot Loops, and my favorite fruit, Birthday Cake, but the Froot Loops family of flavors still largely sticks to a single, extremely ambiguous and in no way authentic fake fruit cocktail instead of charting new latitudes of crunchy cartography—the closest thing we’ve gotten is vacation-shaped marshmallows.
That is, until now: according to Mexican Candy Lady and renowned cereal documentarian Gabe Fonseca, Mexico now has exclusive Tropical Froot Loops. This variety sees the Loops dressed in the more modest hues of a Jamba Juice sampler, with promises of banana and pineapple flavoring.
Ha, what do you know: they turned my favorite fruit, pineapple upside-down cake, into a weird spiky thing!
Unfortunately, the Mexican Candy Lady’s shop still lists Tropical Froot Loops as out of stock, so I won’t be able to review them—at least until I dream about a Cancún getaway tonight…though you’ll have to meet me at the cerebral bungalow if you want to hear about it.
Luckily she does still have new Froot Loops Pops in stock, which appear to be another name (that references Canada’s spherical Corn Pops, perhaps) for the joyous Froot Loops Bloopers that have been out intermittently here in the states.
If you’ve tried Tropical Froot Loops (or want to launch me a box via intercontinental trebuchet), let me know what you think below. And if you have a hemisphere-spanning cereal spotting of your own, you can follow your nose to our Submissions page.
Is Toucan Sam starting a breakfast bestiary? And if so, why?
Of all the cereal brands out there, I wouldn’t have expected Froot Loops to start a weird off-shoot series of pseudo-spiritual successors that draw from the world of myths and mutants. Despite its history with otherworldly creatures, Froot Loops seems a little too innocently avian to flirt with Unicorns and now Mermaids—that’s the kind of crunchy cryptozoology I’d expect from the likes of Kellogg’s own grinning Ra who represents their -isin Bran.
Exclusive to Costco, these Australia-exclusive Mermaid Froot Loops seems like a parallel universe version of Caticorn Cereal, a quasi-Froot Loops pet project that has a temporary Sam’s Club exclusivity here in the states. But while Caticorn Cereal was littered with ghosts of faint fruitiness, Mermaid Froot Loops appear to just be Mardi Grad-colored Loops—though their lack of artificial colors and flavors raise the question of just how genuine the expected Froot Loops fakeness will taste.
today I learned that Australian Kellogg's cereals still exist in a blessed timeline where the mascots didn't mutate into uncanny 3D renders pic.twitter.com/fA1za5Wgis
— Cerealously 🥛🥣 (@cerealouslynet) March 18, 2019
Regardless, Australian Froot Loops deserve my respect, not just for putting a female mascot on a cereal box—an apparently unheard of phenomenon in the U.S. outside of, uh, Dora the Explorer Cereal?—but also for preserving the two-dimensional purity of Toucan Sam, whose American counterpart has become an anthropomorphized terror who would just love to show you how double-jointed his slender, feathered fingers are.
If you’ve tried Mermaid Froot Loops, let me know how they are in the comments. And if you’ve managed to catch another new cereal cryptid on camera, you can share them on our Submissions page—our thanks to Hedvig for the Mermaidian tip.
While American cereal news grinds to a temporary halt before the barnyard bonanza that will be National Cereal Day (March 7th), the bird-minded brains behind Froot Loops and Corn Flakes are evolving that latter rooster-fronted classic for an international audience.
Announced as a collaboration with celebrity chef Ranveer Brar, Kellogg’s three new India-exclusive Corn Flakes varieties will be Thandai Badam, Kesar Pista Badam and Rose Badam. While this may not mean much to my fellow stateside cereal lovers, understanding these unique flavors can go a long way toward informing cereal makers all over the world.
While I was familiar with none of the above taste profiles, they are apparently “enriched with the goodness of real almonds, Kesar, rose, saffron and pistachio.” According to Chef Brar, “This new range of cornflakes is attributed to the local flavours of India in particular that create a sense of nostalgia every time we come across them. It could be the mom who added Roohafza to your milk or the local halwai you went with your grandparents to enjoy a glass of warm kesar badam milk.”
The point here is not (just) that America needs a good pistachio cereal with freeze-dried ice cream bits, but that perhaps American cereal aisles need to rethink their seemingly binary approach to either extremely safe flavors or extremely wacky flavors. Because while chicken & waffles may be nostalgic for some, personally I’d rather see ideas that merely gaze into an uncanny savory–sweet valley instead of diving in snout-first.
What might that look like? They could adopt the Oreo school of thought and try Mississippi Mud Pie Cereal, plumb my Midwest heritage with Superman Ice Cream Cereal, or [Hi, big cereal company! Hire me as your dedicated flavorologist to unlock the full list!].
I’m sure that kind of gated content won’t win me any auspicious emails, but if you do have the means to try any of these cereals, feel free to let me know how they are on our Submissions page! Thanks to reader Nik for the tip on these rose-gold maize shards.
Production Assistant Jupiter says, “You’ll pay for this foolishness in belly rubs.”
Is it not foolish for one of humankind’s creations to claim perfection? Are our works not destined to be beautifully flawed, lest we, in our Icarian hubris, overstep our mortal boundaries in selfish pursuit of godliness?
Something tells me Kellogg’s cutesy-tootsy Caticorn knows nothing about the myths of yore. If it did, we’d likely be gorging ourselves next to Medusa Bran* instead of some declawed creature dreamt up to steal Lisa Frank’s market share. It’s clear from the box alone that not only is Caticorn Cereal kind of unoriginal: its claim of “Berry Purrr-fection” sets a bar so high, it’s Herculean—especially for just another mixed fruit cereal.
As of right now, Caticorn Cereal at least has exclusivity going for it. It’s only available at Sam’s Club for the time being, before rolling out to other stores. But determining whether it’s worth buying a massive, 2.3lb Pandora’s box of it (that contains two cinderblock-sized boxes of its own) is up to my humble taste buds and limited pantry real estate.
*Inspired by my recent cereal mix idea, Medusa Crunch would combine Oreo O’s with gummy worms and freeze-dried pudding pieces for a truly stunning flavor combo. Just call me Purrr-seus.
It’s perfectly normal for a grown man to stress-sweat over diacritic placement, right? I remember when Pokémon first arrived on U.S. shores, and no one could figure out what to do with that funky mark over the e. Then a generation of kids learned to use hexadecimal code on our LiveJournals and all was right with the world. Well, what’s old is new again with the drop of this (figurative and literal) loot box. Blizzard has teamed up with Kellogg’s to extrude a veritable Winston of a cereal.
He’s a super-intelligent gorilla. It’s a genetic engineering joke.
And while the character’s vowel woes are only just beginning, I have to express a personal appreciation for the lack of incorrect apostrophe here. Ever wonder what happens to literature majors who manage to land a summer internship with Kellogg’s? Apparently they get to name cereals. Good on you for not going the Honey Oh’s route, anonymous typist! And we didn’t even have to sit through a diatribe about postmodern travel literature to enjoy it.
The promotion is fairly straightforward: buy a box of Lucio-Ohs (see, we’ve dropped the accent mark already because convenience… and search engines) and upload a photo of your receipt to the Kellogg’s website to receive an extra in-game loot boost. With normal loot coming at $2/box, it’s not the most cost-sensitive way to up your chances at anything legendary. As the man says, though, sometimes you’ve got to give yourself to the rhythm.
Speaking of which, Lucio is hardly an intuitive choice. We’ll probably never find out how the decision was made, and that means every night for the rest of my life I have to stare at the ceiling, wondering what Caramel Wrecking Balls might have been. Instead, the loops here are seemingly meant to represent sonic waves. Per Lucio’s default color scheme and Brazilian nationality (perhaps making him the most diverse cereal mascot on shelves at present), they’re yellow and green, so of course that means a rare lemon-lime cereal. Continue reading
Forget the snakes—there’s a JPEG compression in my boot!
Yes, the above piece of cereal box lo-fi art is the only trustworthy documentation we have of Kellogg’s upcoming cereal–cinema collab: Toy Story 4’s Carnival Berry Cereal! The fourth film in the beloved (and occasionally tear-jerking) Pixar series is also getting the franchise’s third cereal, continuing the apparently Kelloggianly blood-bound partnership that brought us 2002’s excitingly grahamed Buzz Blasts and the considerably less creative Toy Story 3 Cereal.
It remains unclear whether this new Carnival Berry flavor will be a proper testament to the new film’s setting, or just another inscrutably arbitrary flavor choice—much like the one that brought us the similar-sounding Berry Purrr-fection taste in Caticorn Cereal. Kellogg’s has had, at least from my perspective, a rather slipshod start to 2019. Outside of some awesome Pop-Tarts paraphernalia and the news of succulent Corn Pops yet to come, the minds behind Froot Loops and Apple Jacks have had rings run around them by the explosive innovations of Post.
I mean, would it killed them to have done a Carnival Cotton Candy flavor instead?
But speculating flavors is about as productive as counting pixels, so while we wait for this cereal to hit stores, I’d rather do my best to try and find another cereal listed near Toy Story 4 Cereal: these Blueberry Cheerios. Big thanks to The Junk Food Aisle for his tips on both! If you have cereal news—or a stolen Blueberry Cheerio preserved in amber—please don’t hesitate to share!
