I hate Oreo Puffs.
Not because they taste bad, mind you—they’re perfectly serviceable as a milquetoast little cookies & cream cereal that tastes more or less exactly like Oreo O’s.
No, I hate Oreo Puffs because they perfectly encapsulate the ongoing creative decline of the cereal industry.
I’m sure most people would agree that cereal “isn’t as good as it used to be.” And sure, a big part of that is how we view retro cereals through rose-tinted taste buds. Everything tasted better when you were a kid, because you didn’t have adult responsibilities, nor an adult’s sensitive stomach and tolerance for black coffee that makes sweet things taste just too sweet.
But it’s also impossible to deny that, on a pure formulation level, cereals are worse now. Time and time again, Big Cereal makers are replacing or diluting heartier base grains like wheat and oat flour with cheaper, mealier, obtrusively flavored corn flour. They’re also streamlining the geometry, cutting back on fun marbit shapes and turning everything into spheres—again, probably because it’s cheaper than running a bunch of different extruder machines. They’re removing fun and games from the back of the box and replacing them with simplistic graphics or pithy copy. Meanwhile, the very idea of a “free prize inside” is fossilized in a museum somewhere, I think next to the Diplodocus.
And perhaps worst of all, Big Cereal just isn’t releasing anything novel or interesting. Sure, there are exceptions, even in a strikingly uninspired year like 2024, but by and large, new cereals fall into one of three camps: a reintroduction of a cereal that already existed, a cross-application of a flavor they’ve already used elsewhere, or something that no one in their right mind ever asked for.
Post’s Oreo Puffs, as the omni-paradigm of an unimaginative “new” cereal, does all of the above and more (by which I mean less). Continue reading
