oreo o's - Cerealously

Oreo O’s are (kind of) back in America! It’s a Christmas miracle!

Wait, you mean that was almost three weeks ago?

Okay: it’s a New Year’s miracle!

Oh, it’s already January 11th?

Uh, fine: it’s a…German Apples Day miracle?

Let’s go with that. Whether it’s trees bearing deutschen apfels or the good people at Malt-O-Meal, someone deserves praise for bringing cream-speckled chocolate rings back to American breakfast aisles. Cookies & Cream obviously isn’t Oreo O’s—it doesn’t even have a jazzy blob mascot with sunglasses and a creamy quiff hairdo—but it should definitely be considered a spiritual successor.

See, Post Foods lost the right to produce Oreo O’s in a confusing business acquisition snafu between Kraft, General Foods, and Dongsuh Foods, leading to the beloved cookie cereal’s 2005 discontinuation in the U.S. But Post also bought Malt-O-Meal last year. And they must’ve still had their old cream-filling infusion machine laying around somewhere gathering dust, because those recognizable, glittering white and brown cocoa rings we all spent large sums of money importing from Korea are now back on native soil.

Okay, I might have been the only one sinking significant funds into trans-Pacific breakfast shipments, but that’s beside the point. What matters is that, after all they’ve been through, Oreo O’s are (pretty much) home free again under a different name. I like to think they’re just in the witness protection program for witnessing whatever top-secret process turns Oreo cookies into pure cereal magic.

I imagine it involves divine intervention and no fewer than a dozen wizards. Continue reading →

In the distant future, when all food is eaten in pill form and my great-grandkids ask me to describe the magic of breakfast cereal, I’ll oil my cyborg jaw motor and tell them about Oreo O’s.

I’ll tell them about the 10 glorious years America spent eating those cookies ‘n’ creme flavored rings. I’ll tell them about Oreo O’s 1997 introduction, orange-sprinkled Halloween Oreo O’s from 2000, and 2002’s marshmallowy Extreme Creme Taste Oreo O’s. I’ll captivate them with tales of sunglasses-wearing milk glob mascots who closely resembled PSY from Gangnam Style.

Then there’ll be a brief intermission as I explain what the heck Gangnam Style was. Seriously: I don’t know how it got over 2 billion views either, children of the future.

Then I’ll tell them about the tragic 2007 discontinuation of Oreo O’s. I’ll pause to build suspense, and then I’ll tell them about the legal loophole that allowed South Korean food manufacturer Dongsuh Companies Inc. to keep producing Oreo O’s as the rest of the world mourned the loss of milk’s favorite cereal. With my own eyes glistening, I’ll tell them about the E. coli contamination that forced Dongsuh to recall Oreo O’s in 2014, as well as the two-year Oreo O’s drought that followed—known globally as “The Second Dark Ages.”

But then I’ll finish with the story of Fall 2016, when an unexpected tweet from a Korean food account alerted me that the dawn of a new age was upon us. Continue reading →

Cerealously

Tag Archives: oreo o’s

Review: Malt-O-Meal Cookies & Cream Cereal

Review: Oreo O’s Cereal (South Korea)