Look, I know I’m a little behind on posting all the latest cereal news to come out of the last week—and I’ll get to it, don’t worry—but I think you’ll forgive me for jumping the queue here: because this is a code orange, folks.
Long squeeze short, on May 4th, Tropicana is releasing Tropicana Crunch—the first cereal designed to be eaten with orange juice instead of milk—exclusively at TropicanaCrunch.com. Apollonianly blasphemous, I know.
There are a lot of problems here, foremost of them being, who asked for this? Tropicana’s justification is a survey they held, boasting that 15 million people out there have tried OJ and cereal before, and “Half of the adults who poured OJ over their cereal did so because they thought it looked like it would taste good,” while “more than one in three who tried it did so because they love OJ and thought it would be a good combination.” The key operating word in both data points, of course, being thought, with conspicuously little evidence that any of these people actually enjoyed it.
But yeah, taste, texture, and possible pulp problems aside, I’m also just curious what makes this a cereal designed to be eaten with OJ. You want me to believe that the folks at Tropicana, who really only make juice, have the industrial machinery and gastro-engineers to develop a high-tech juice-complementing cereal? No, I think it’s far more likely that Tropicana Crunch, billed as a honey almond clusters cereal, just pulled a Timbits and had Post send them a butt-ton of leftover Almond Honey Bunches of Oats to reskin.
Assuming I can get my hands on a box, I’m prepared to be disproven, if not pleasantly surprised, though—a lot of people in my Twitter replies attested to having tried and enjoyed OJ in cereal after all, plus Cap’n Crunch’s Orange Creampop Crunch was one of my all-time favorite cereals, so anything’s possible.
What do you think? Will this be a juicy breakfast revolution, or a Sunny D-saster?