Tag Archives: news

News: Star Wars Baby Yoda Cereal

New Baby Yoda Cereal

EPISODE MMXX: THE PHANTOM FAD

It is a time of indoor inertia and slow-digesting creativity. General Grievous’ great-grand-droid-child Mills has assumed his ancestral rank and inherited a diabolical plot: to pump the galaxy full of cloned cash-grab cereals offering little flavor and even less timely appeal. His defenses only loosely fortified with intergalactic vitamins and minerals, it’s up to White Squadron to douse Mills’ plans before it’s too late. But the General has come prepared, for he’s surrounded himself with a belt of razor-sharp corn asteroids, which even sogginess can’t make much worse….

Let’s be honest: Star Wars cereals haven’t been good for a while. Not since the days of C3POs, a double-hooped cereal that was later charmingly reborn as Winnie the Pooh’s Hunny B’s, have we seen the omnipresent series done crunchy justice beyond the tried-and-truly boring formula of corn pieces and marshmallows. While I love marbit cereals as much as the next Rodian, to take the graces of Lucky Charms and neuter the oat component is a tragedy most unwise.

Baby Yoda Cereal is the latest example. While I’ll throttle my own personal opinion on the itty-bitty alien muppet itself—I’ve kind of fallen off the Star Wars train since around the time in the early ’00s that my parents wouldn’t upgrade our dial-up internet solely so I could play Star Wars Galaxies—I can’t say I’m excited about Baby Yoda’s cereal. Since The Mandalorian Season 2 doesn’t drop until October, it feels strangely timed. Plus, it doesn’t even appear to have the fruity flavor of its General Mills predecessors. But since that fruit flavor was also chemically cringeworthy, maybe comparative corny blandness isn’t such a bad thing.

Whether this is the cereal you’re looking for or not, expect it in stores this summer.

News: Funfetti Cereal is Coming Soon!

New Pillsbury Funfetti Cereal Box

I’ve written about a lot of battered & baked cereals in my time, but this one takes the confetti cake.

Coming soon from Pillsbury, Funfetti Cereal promises to be ‘the fun and only’ birthday/vanilla/angel food cake cereal you’ll ever need. Just how it will be “bursting with fun” remains unclear, but as Funfetti Cereal’s release trails a full Chuck E. Cheese itinerary’s worth of birthday cake flavored breakfast products, these sprinkled spheres are going to have to work really, flavorfully hard to avoid being just another boring, exponentially sugared cereal.

I’ll admit, I’m a bit over vanilla and birthday cake in the breakfast aisle, because its typical one-note sweetness feels like a cheap cop-out to avoid paying for richer, more imaginative flavors, but hey: at least Funfetti looks pretty (pretti?).

What’s especially strange here is that General Mills is not producing this cereal, despite Pillsbury being their subsidiary brand. This tip comes from longtime friend Gabe Fonseca, who suspects Post might be producing the product, as they were the ghost writers behind the similar-looking Canada exclusive Birthday Cake Timbits Cereal.

Though it already appears on Walmart’s site, Funfetti Cereal’s release date is as of yet unknown. Hopefully Pillsbury & their mysterious co. take their time with this one, because unlike a real gooey cake, a half-baked cake cereal is like a trick candle: it blows, and never grants our wishes.

News: Chex Quest HD Will Be Free-To-Play on Steam This Summer!

Chex Quest HD Six Playable Characters Chex Mix Squadron

If you showed the above image to a young me, two decades ago, I would rocket out of the Garfield library book (you know the ones) I had my nose buried lasagna-deep in and call dibs on playing as the Wheat Chex Warrior.

Yes, this has been an extradimensionally surreal week for me and millio—err, thousands…well, maybe just dozens of diehard Chex Quest fans like me. At the ripe, but far from stale, age of 24, the Chex Quest franchise has a bizarre history that spans imagination and risked litigation. If you aren’t familiar with the origin story that’s brought us to this post, I highly recommend reading my previous two articles on the game: a full history of the original trilogy, and a teaser-debuting interview with Charles Jacobi, who art directed the original Chex Quest, lovingly made Chex Quest 3, and is now helming Chex Quest HD production.

But in short, here’s a bullet-pointed breakdown: Continue reading

News: Minions Vanilla Cake Cereal

New Minions Rise of Gru Vanilla Cake Cereal

No.

Uh-uh.

Absolutely not.

We just…can’t…keep…doing this.

I mean, how many times in this past year have I been forced to fluff up otherwise tepid blog posts about blandly flavored vanilla and/or birthday cake products that likewise taste like coagulated marshmallow fluff? Worse yet, how many times over the course of the last decade have I been compelled to write about the Minions franchise as if it isn’t the worst thing to happen to Facebook memes since the birth of JPEG compression?

What we have here is a perfect storm: a new corn-based Minions Cereal, with unimaginative marshmallows and a flavor that makes no sense for its licensed property. Vanilla Cake Minions Cereal, releasing to promote The Rise of Gru movie, is particularly tragic because there has been an actual good and creative Minions Cereal before! No, not that one, but the original Minions Banana Berry Cereal, a uniquely tropical blend of flavors that not only did justice to these pitiable creatures’ favorite fruit but also called to mind the long-extinct likes of Urkel O’s.

Aside from this poignant loss of potential, I have nothing much to say about this Vanilla Cake Minions Cereal, first reported on by Cereal Life. Maybe, just maybe, it will have some potential to bring intrigue to this world when stale, discarded half-boxes of the stuff mutates in toxic sewer ooze with similarly chucked-away bags of Baby Shark Cereal, producing a toothsome Twinkie-shaped cereal leviathan that will stymie local vigilantes for decades. Maybe.

News: Kellogg’s JUMBO SNAX Cereal Snacks

Kellogg's New Jumbo Snax: Apple Jacks, Froot Loops, Caramel Corn Pops, and Frosted Flakes Tiger Paws Cereals Snacks

Ever love the palate-shredding power of coarsely serrated grain so much that you wish you could just swing a full medieval mace of the stuff at your mouth’s roof, instead of chewing a few dozen caltrops?

Well boy, do the makers of Morningstar have a product for you!

Despite the threat to inter-oral integrity they may pose for eager eaters, Kellogg’s new JUMBO SNAX form an exciting quartet of familiar cereal flavors enlarged to both show and taste texture. Arriving this May, these cereal snacks will come in both individual, 0.45oz packets and big honkin’ resealable 6oz suckers. With this, Kellogg’s becomes the third Big Cereal company to sell Big Cereal, paving the way for Post to close the circle with what I can only assume will be called ” Oreo OMG’s.”

But let’s talk about the four Kellogg’s JUMBO SNAX soon to be available. Of these, Froot Loops and Apple Jacks seem the most straightforward in their adaptation of ancestral cereal sizing. Though it seems interesting that there are no green loops present on the Apple Jacks’ packaging, which, if that holds true for the crunchy hula hoops inside, we may be getting a limited palette of Froot-by-the-Foot-sized Loops, too.

Continue reading

News: Confetti Cake Pop-Tarts Bites

New Confetti Cake Pop-Tarts Bites

Ceeee-le-brate meh times, c’mon!

Just as every bootleg Chuck E. Cheese birthday party—what, you’ve never been to Buck G. Brie?—is bound to be punctuated by a cake so paradoxically full of empty sweetness and frosted typos, so too is a Pop-Tarts gala destined for the apex of adequacy.

Following three successful Pop-Tarts Bites launches that run a rich flavor gamut of Strawberry, Brown Sugar Cinnamon, and Chocolatey Fudge, Kellogg’s is commemorating the occasion not with a fan-favorite taste like S’Mores or Wild Berry, but with…Confetti Cake. As a former grocery store bakery worker, let me earnestly say this:

What a load of sheet.

Look, I’m not saying Confetti Cake Pop-Tarts Bites will be bad, but if recent caked-on breakfast products are any indication, this is just an excuse to dump sugar, vanilla and maybe buttercream into a churning cauldron and call it a day.

Even more perplexing are the naming conventions within the Pop-Tarts Bites sub-brand. Chocolate Fudge Pop-Tarts became Chocolatey Fudge Bites, and now Confetti Cupcake Pop-Tarts are simply Confetti Cake Bites. Is this an accidental oversight, or am I meant to believe that these teeny pastries contain more concerted cake flavor than a Tart five times their size?

Either way, we’ll find out soon when Confetti Cake Pop-Tarts Bites drop and I end up eating them by the cupful.

News: Caramel Apple Jacks are Coming Soon!

New Caramel Apple Jacks Cereal

It might not look like it, but the above cereal is historic.

See, in the entire history of Apple Jacks, there has never been a limited-edition flavor that isn’t, well, apple or cinnamon—and marshmallows don’t count either. Instead, just about every “new” Apple Jacks variant introduces a new shape—some more sublimely strange than others, but most ending up inexplicably dyed blue.

Which is why Kellogg’s new Caramel Apple Jacks promise to bring a breath of freshly preserved air to the brand. Reportedly releasing this June. In a surprising bout of geometric consistency, Apple Jacks didn’t even try to shape these green-replacing sienna hoops into like, half-melted Werthers cubes, or even a blue rutabaga (you know, just because).

For a cereal that’s never really tasted much like apples, it will be interesting to see whether Caramel Apple Jacks are another one-note wonder, or if their sticky sweetness will be worth bobbing into a tub of milk for.

I, for one, hope the back of the box at least includes a recipe for fermenting Apple Jacks cereal dust into a fine, caramelized cider.

News: Swiss Miss Hot Cocoa with Lucky Charms Marshmallows

Swiss Miss Lucky Charms Hot Cocoa Mix Marshmallows

Ever wonder what one of those iridescent parking lot oil slicks would taste like? Well now you won’t have to risk braincells nor brawn to find out, because once these Lucky Charms marshmallows melt into your Swiss Miss Hot Cocoa, I have to imagine the resulting soup will call to mind muddy puddles, dirt pies, and watercolor mixers.

But will Swiss Miss with Lucky Charms Marshmallows still taste good? Almost certainly, because there’s really nothing Lucky Charms branded marshmallows will add to this Nesquikish stew that mini marshmallows haven’t already been doing for centuries.

Nevertheless, expect these hot mixes to hit shelves any day now—if nothing else, I can guarantee they’ll taste better than the kind of cocoa my kid self made by microwaving chocolate milk.