Tag Archives: life

Review: Chocolate Life Cereal

New Chocolate Life Cereal Review Box

Oh, thank goodness. There’s a new Life out—this current one’s been getting pretty stale. I think 2020 was its expiration date. I can only imagine that living a chocolate life is gonna be a heck of a lot sweeter than the plain one I have every day.

Wait, you mean Quaker’s new Chocolate Life Cereal doesn’t include a free immersive Matrix pill as the prize inside? I have to just eat the stuff and pretend I’ve been thrown down a perspective-shifting rabbit hole? Yeugh. This new cereal ride is quite the lemon already.

That said, Chocolate Life is, from the outset, more exciting than the long-running, Mikey-beloved cereal brand’s other latest spinoff varieties. Because unlike the light flavor-glosses found on Vanilla or Strawberry Life, Chocolate Life actually features visible cocoa-infusion at the base grain level.

But is it enough to overcome my disdain for Life as a road-rolled facsimile of Chex? Only time will tell—and not a lot of time, at that, before things get soggy. Continue reading

News: Chocolate Life Cereal

New Chocolate Life Cereal

Talk about a redundant name. We all know that chocolate, much like ball, already is life. Ergo, when life gives you chocolate, it’s really giving you it’s all.

But do I trust Chocolate and Life to successfully meld in the same cereal? That remains to be seen, as I have a bit of a review backlog to clear before I go on the prowl for Quaker’s newly released cocoa-infused, multigrain thatched squares. I’ll admit, I’m a little apprehensive; I’m not the biggest Life cereal fan, simply because they lack a satisfying crunch, instead of crisping into kindling like a road-rolled Chex piece. Plus, Life’s latest new cereals didn’t blow me away either.

But with my dark outlook on Life, I might just be the eternal pessimist. If the idea of Chocolate Life has you ready to uproot yours in search of it, you can already find it listed on Walmart.com.

Review: Strawberry Life Cereal

Quaker Strawberry Life Cereal Review Box

Believe me, the strawberry life is a tough one to live.

I would know: I’ve tried it. Always being the sweetest and most loved in the room? It’s not a proud path to follow, but you hand out enough free gum and anyone can be the most loved kid in 5th grade American History class. And having to hang out with Franken Berry? Respect to his legacy, but as a conversationalist, he’s a bit of a dolt—or at least a pain in the neck.

I did like wearing pastel pink though.

That’s all to say that Quaker’s new Strawberry Life cereal faces a questionable judge in this review. I found that there have been very few fruity Life Cereals (Pumpkin Spice doesn’t count!), and perhaps for good reason: I typically associate Life’s multigrain biscuits with richer flavors, so a fruit-filled flavor like strawberry will have to pull some real flavor sorcery to realign my expectation of what a Mikey-approved cereal can be.

Let’s see how much of the strawberry life this can restore to my currently bananas existence. Continue reading

Review: Quaker Gingerbread Spice Life Cereal

Quaker Gingerbread Spice Life Cereal Review – Box

October 14th, 2017: the day Dan finally shut up about wanting a gingerbread cereal.

Yes, this is a landmark day—literally: the spot where I excitedly stamped my feet upon tasting Gingerbread Spice Life Cereal is now craterous enough to be deemed a geologic point of interest. I’ve begged for a gingerbread cereal (Gingerbread Toast Crunch, to be more specific, but gingerbeggars can’t be choosers) since the first year I had enough teeth to eat both a gingerbread man and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. And after decades of disappointment, that stoically grinning Quaker Oats guy must have finally felt my annoying laments reverberate through his 2-dimensional cardboard plane, because we now have Gingerbread Spice Life Cereal: America’s first ever gingerbread breakfast cereal.

I told myself I’d wait ’til winter months to review this stuff, since i have so many autumn treats to write about, but pumpkin spice and caramel apple be damned: if I don’t give my inner child this one, he’s going to beat my internal organs with a whiffle ball bat and a pair of Sock’em Boppers. Continue reading

News: Gingerbread Spice Life Cereal is Coming Soon!

Gingerbread Life Cereal – Quaker Spiced Multigrain Box

(Image via Quaker)

DAYS SINCE LIFE-CHANGING CEREAL INCIDENT: 0

It’s been a while since I had to change that sign, but this news seals it. Limited Edition Gingerbread Spice Life Multigrain Cereal is coming this holiday season, which, seeing how people prepare for winter celebration, means a box of Gingerbread Life it should have been in my pantry two weeks ago, sandwiched between Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Cinnamon Frosted Flakes to make a crunchy speculoos sandwich.

Speaking of which, I have a history with gingerbread cereal—or at least with fanatically wanting it. A search on my site reveals how big of a gingerbread fanman I am, and I’ve always thought that Cinnamon Toast Crunch would adopt the flavor first (if anyone ever did), due to their reputation for holiday cereals tasty enough to open your third eye and hang mistletoe from the lashes.

Life Cereal was one of the last brands I’d expect to release a naturally flavored gingerbread cereal—right alongside Crispix, Froot Loops, and Fiber One—but seeing how well they spiced Pumpkin Spice Life, I’m willing to give old man Quaker the benefit of the doubt. Seriously: the only thing on the line is the crushingly weighty anticipation built up slowly over decades of my life. That’s it. No pressure.

While I wait for Gingerbread Spice Life to hit shelves, I think I need to add something new to my cereal bucket list. Almost all my dream flavors have now existed as cereals: maple, PB&J, and now gingerbread. I’ll just have to pick something so obscure and impossible that it’ll never happen and I can wistfully dream about it forever.

Zucchini Bread Toast Crunch, anyone?

Four More from “Cereal Time with Gabe Fonseca!”

Need something to Brite-n your day? Okay, do you need four things to brighten your day after that terrible pun?

Well you’re in luck, because there are four new episodes in cereal archivist Gabe Fonseca’s Cereal Time YouTube series. Longtime Cereal Time binge watchers know the drill, but I’ll catch everyone else up to speed on this series in one sentence:

One man spotlights one cereal every one week to produce three-to-four fun-filled minutes of breakfast nostalgia.

Intrigued? Let’s start somewhere over the rainbow with Gabe’s episode on Rainbow Brite Cereal. As he states in the video, this 1985 cereal was a tie-in with Rainbow Brite’s animated feature film, and it features a literal rainbow of fruity and crunchy…shapes?

The more logical would see them as Rainbow Brite’s hair curls or shirt sleeves, but I prefer to call them “Macaroni & cheese mixed with the colorful grubs Timon and Pumbaa eat in The Lion King.” Continue reading

Review: Quaker Limited Edition Pumpkin Spice Life Cereal

Limited Edition Pumpkin Spice Life Cereal Box

I know this cereal is called Pumpkin Spice Life, but in my mind, there’s an invisible equals sign in-between the last two words.

Pumpkin Spice = Life.

It’s the kind of thing a true autumn addict would get tattooed above their knuckles after getting sent to jail for building jack-o-lantern totem poles above the legal height limit. If that sounds like the plot of a gritty Goosebumps reboot, then I’ve succeeded.

But for these next 3-4 months, pumpkin spice really will be life for grocery store browsers and BuzzFeed editors everywhere. And the latest cereal staple to jump on this cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, cloves, Donner, and Blitzen bandwagon is Life. Continue reading

News: Fall into a Bowl of Limited Edition Multigrain Pumpkin Spice Life Cereal

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(UPDATE: I reviewed Pumpkin Spice Life Cereal!)

“Pumpkin Spice Life” doesn’t even sound like the name of a cereal. It just sounds like an accurate description of September through November these days.

From yogurt and doughnuts to dish soap and cat litter (nope, I’m not kidding), pumpkin spice takes no prisoners with its potent combo of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, sometimes cloves, and sometimes even actual pumpkin—but usually just an orange Starbucks squirt bottle labeled “P.U.M.P.K.I.N.”

Two years ago, you would have been hard pressed to find pumpkin spice in any cereal outside of Trader Joe’s Pumpkin O’s. But now as the Great Pumpkin Invasion continues (not to be confused with the beloved holiday special Duck and Cover Charlie Brown: It’s the Great Pumpkin Invasion!), more and more breakfast classics are getting in on the fun.

Frosted Mini-Wheats and Puffins did it last year, Special K has already thrown its hat in the 2016 ring using its noodly red letter appendages, and now even the hip ol’ Quaker dude is investigating this hip trend all the young people are raving about.

It looks a lot like normal Life, but it claims to be “Naturally Flavored with Other Natural Flavors.” This is in sharp contrast to the spicy superstars of Special K Pumpkin Spice Crunch, but I, for one, am looking forward to Pumpkin Spice Life: “the cereal so natural they named it twice.”

Limited Edition Pumpkin Spice Life cereal popped up on product review site Influenster the other day, and our ever-vigilant friends at Candy Hunting blew the story as wide open as a chunky gourd on an episode of Punkin’ Chunkin’. Thanks again to Candy Hunting for being a regular Encyclopedia Brown when it comes to all things brown: be they chocolate, caramel, or peanut butter.

While we we wait for Pumpkin Spice Life to hit shelves, we can just squirt a bunch of that P.U.M.P.K.I.N. syrup on our Cinnamon Life.