You know the end of the movie, when the big bad has been defeated and the main, side, tertiary, and no-name characters (who will definitely get fan fiction lore) are all celebrating a fight/romance/exorcism well done?
That’s where we are—in the third act of Honeycomb’s story.
Here’s the IMDB-worthy synopsis for those who eat their breakfasts under the comfort of a shady rock:
Honeycomb cereal, good for years.
Lots of people, eat Honeycomb for years.
Post Foods, makes Honeycomb all natural.
Post Foods, thinks they know what people want.
Post Foods, is wrong.
Hundreds of people, mad about Honeycomb.
Hundreds of people, blame me, divine meddling, spam the word GARBAGE.
Post Foods, brings back Honeycomb
Cool, hip blogger, reviews Honeycomb again
Long story short, BIG REAL HONEY FLAVOR is back, baby, and Andre the Giant is fist-pumping in his grave. Now let’s see if all that buzz holds up. Continue reading →
To paraphrase Heath Ledger’s Joker: “Release a new cereal, and no one panics. Tweak the recipe of an old cereal, and everyone loses their minds!”
Yes, these past couple years have seen a mass vocalization of irritated cereal fans, many of which seem to think teh very fabric of their remembered childhood is under attack by greedy, scheming cereal companies who are corrupting their favorite breakfasts and effectively erasing their personal history in the process.
While some cereal formula changes may be done to save cash, some, like Honeycomb and Trix, have merely been misguided attempts to make cereals all natural—which companies think consumers want. And though diehard fans shut down those last two changes with cries of “the naturalness of my cereal is none of your beeswax!” and “silly General Mills, Trix are for artificial colors more technicolored than Joseph’s dreamcoat!” other cereals, like Alpha-Bits and now Honey Oh’s remain metamorphosed into something new altogether.
This is all to say that cereal companies should probably keep their Tony-sized paws off the classics, and consumers should probably be more clear about what the heck they want out of their morning meals. But while that debate will doubtlessly roll on until my comments section is quarantined by the CDC, I finally found these newly formulated Honey Oh’s for review.
Formerly known as “Honey Graham Oh’s” or “Honey Graham Oh My Goodness They’re So Good But Leave My Mouth Torn To Shred’s,” these new rings dared to remove graham from one my own favorite cereals. I’ll remain un-opinionated until I try them, but there is one thing I’ll say for sure: Post better have shipped their leftover graham flour to the Teddy Grahams factory. Continue reading →
I’m not gonna lie to you: I don’t hit a lot of trails.
The Oregon Trail for PC? Sure. Trailer Park Boys reruns? Definitely? But any sort of wooded or, dare I say, forested path that requires physical exertion and appreciation for non-pixelated nature? Count me out.
That’s how dysentery starts.
But I’m still more familiar with fictional trails than being fit, which is why I won’t penalize Grape-Nuts Trail Mix Crunch for its box’s blatant lie. See, this stuff isn’t new: it’s just a rebrand of 5-year old cereal Grape-Nuts Fit—a fact Grape-Nuts itself confirmed on my Instagram.
Luckily, I never reviewed Grape-Nuts Fit before, so it won’t be redundant if I do so now. Plus this potent little brick of a cereal box weighs in at over 1 pound, which, given its size, makes it count as powerlifting every time I pour from it.
A sphere of tropical water protected by a hairy rind so thick you could clock a cartoon character ‘cross the noggin without cracking it, the coconut as an edible fruit takes a backseat to the thing’s most iconic purposes: flavoring piña coladas, serving as a hula girl brassiere, and signaling the entrance of an invisible horse.
Yet the coconut’s incomparable flavor has still developed a cult following—most people either hate coconut, are indifferent about it, or go absolutely cuckoo and nuts about it, rubbing its various oils and butters over their face, arms, and…uh…upside-down cakes.
That’s why every time a coconut cereal comes out, I applaud it. It must be a risk for the company involved, yet it’s still a rare treat that lets me have a breakfast luau without busting out the maple-glazed pig roast.
Case in point: I’m excited to review Great Grains Coconut Almond Crunch, because two nuts are better than one.
Unlike Nutter Butters or Nilla Wafers, Chips Ahoy! has always been on my bad side.
No, not because of the cookie brand’s taste, its perpetual civil war between chewy and crunchy (chewy all the way), or its retiring of one my favorite snack mascots: the Cookie Guy.
I’m upset at Chips Ahoy! for its brazen, borderline offensive abuse of the exclamation point. It’s part of the trademark, meaning it has to be included even in the middle of sentences, eternally pissing off writers, word processors, and autocorrects. It’s kinda like how “Oreos,” isn’t the correct pluralization of Oreo cookies, but this one has 100x more thrown phones.
So sorry, geeks, dweebs, poindexters and pedants, but I’m not using the exclamation point anymore in my review of Post’s new Chips Ahoy Cereal, the companion of Nutter Butter Cereal—both of which hit Walmart at the end of December and stores everywhere April 2018.
Now that I’ve vented about punctuation and mourned the loss of an anthropomorphized foodstuff, the only thing left on my pre-review checklist is “wonder about something pointless.”
I wonder if in Spanish-speaking countries, they stylize it as ¡Chips Ahoy! Continue reading →
“What’s the best peanut butter cereal?” is perhaps one of breakfast’s most divisive questions—right up there with “is cereal a soup?”
(No, it’s not: soup is a concept, not a thing defined by its components. Please stop asking me.)
There are many who ardently support Cap’n Crunch’s Peanut Butter Crunch. There are others who swear by Reese’s Puffs or new Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheerios (or at least, 50% of them). Some weirdos (like me) prefer the salted intricacies of Peanut Butter Puffins. And there are still others (me again) who desperately long for the return of JIF Cereal, going so far as to rally a posse of choosy moms to voice their cause.
But while peanut butter cereal has long been a small, yet hotly contested category, there’s a new contender in town, one with a long legacy of peanut butter snack cookie domination.
Yes, Nutter Butter Cereal is real, and it is debuting alongside Chips Ahoy! cereal to close a trilogy of “cerealized grade school cafeteria treat your mom used to carefully ration out in Ziploc bags, like seriously Ma, only two?”, a divine cereal lineage pioneered by the great creator: Oreo O’s.
Nutter Butter cookies have always been an aggressively peanut buttery cookie to me. So I’m not saying I want this cereal to gum my tongue to the roof of my mouth like tasty rubber cement, but if I’m left smacking my lips like a confused dog, I wouldn’t be upset. Continue reading →
Whether they’re called Twist & Shouts, “Lickety Splits, or…*shudder*…Creme Betweens, off-brand Oreo cookies just feel uncannily wrong to eat. Even Hydrox, being the original chocolate sandwich cookie, just feels like the snack equivalent of a cheap bootleg VHS with hilariously mistranslated English to Chinese and back to English subtitles.
“Oreo: the treat that lactose loves to be smothering!”
And that’s how I feel about Post debuting Cookies & Cream Cereal in Canada, too. Though it’s ostensibly the same cereal they released as Oreo O’s in the States earlier this year—which was, in turn, ostensibly the same as Malt-O-Meal Cookies & Cream Cereal, which is also a Post holding—I can’t help but think that my brand-loyal taste buds would reject these crunchy cookie rings faster than my brain rejects the blasphemous existence of “Low Fat Oreos.”
I don’t know why Post couldn’t bring the Oreo O’s name to Canada—maybe border patrol would’ve “confiscated” them for “thorough gastrointestinal inspection”—but thanks to reader Jas A.’s above photo, we know that our northern neighbors will at least get to experience the cereal’s deliciousness in a comparatively anonymized form.
And hey, the box art is actually pretty cool! We don’t get enough purple candy stripes in the cereal aisle (come on, Raisin Bran: live a little!), and the cereal name’s stylized font looks like something that would be cross-stitched, framed, and hung above the toilet in a motor home. Which works here, because in my mind, nothing says “haphazard family camping trip” quite like generic cereal eaten out of flimsy paper bowls with lukewarm 2%.
Thanks again to Jas for the photo. If you’d like to share a cereal photo from anywhere in the world (even from my own backyard—I’d be impressed), mail it on over to our Submissions page for a chance to see it on this site!
Aside from hunting new cereals, Pop-Tarts and Hostess snack cakes (my secret passion—Chocodiles used to be my fudge-slathered white whales), one of my oldest grocery store past times is looking for box art variations of breakfast mainstays.
Sometimes the differences are nuanced and small, like earlier this year when French Toast Crunch’s plain red box adopted a drop shadow, but sometimes classic cereal boxes we’ve come to love dramatically evolve overnight, like metamorphosed sugar-encrusted butterflies emerging from their cardboard chrysalises. As we’ll soon see, French Toast Crunch just did that, too—and so did another long-beloved morning mainstay.
But before we judge those, let’s appraise Snap, Crackle, and Pop’s recent Rice Krispies plastic surgery, which I noticed while trying (and failing) to find those elusive new Pumpkin Spice Rice Krispies Treats. Continue reading →
