New Home

For a variety of reasons I'm moving this blog to a new url. You can now find us at cerealfordinner365.com
Stop on by our new corner of the internet and check some new posts, a revised layout, and more.

Thanks!

The Quaker Oats Man Picks Favorites

I noticed that Quaker is a little inconsistent with the way they use their logo on cereal boxes. For Corn Bran Crunch (a product that doesn’t sound like it contains a whole lot of Quaker Oats), they couldn’t be more proud of their mascot. A gloriously illustrated image seems to occupy a fourth of the box front for this relatively little known cereal.

Corn Bran Crunch is probably Quaker’s flagship product.

Life Cereal gets a pretty similar treatment on its nicely redesigned box.

However, Capt’n Crunch Crunch Berries seems to have spontaneously sprung into existence. From the box front it looks as if no cereal company wants to claim responsibility for this popular and well known product. It’s not until you look at the very bottom of the nutritional information panel do you find a tiny one color Quaker logo. I suppose the peace loving Quakers have no problem letting the Cap’n do their dirty work in the fight against the evil Soggies, but he shouldn’t look forward to a parade the next time he sails into home port. 

Cereal for Dinner would like to thank the Cap'n for his years of crunch-a-tizing the U.S. of A. 

Five Classic Cereal Commercials

C3POs

I don’t remember this commercial, but I can only imagine it was the highlight of Saturday morning cartoon commercials. This much fresh Star Wars content in the 80's would have been a lot to handle for a kid just trying to make it through The Wuzzles.

Nerds
This one is near and dear to my heart, but not because of the cereal (which was pretty awful), but because I got to try it before any other kid in my neighborhood. Growing up my dad worked for a grocery warehouse, and every once and a while he would get to bring home items companies were test marketing or that just hadn’t been released to the general public yet. I remember sampling, and having my mind blown by Micro Magic burgers and shakes before anyone had a clue that such a thing existed. We sampled flavors of Crush soda that I don’t think ever made it to market (apple, grapefruit). 

One day my dad came home with Nerds Cereal. I loved Nerds, I loved Cereal, I loved exclusivity, what could go wrong? Well, pretty much everything. The gimmick of the two flavors in one box was nice to see carried through, but both flavors tasted the same, and neither were very good. Plus, the moment milk got in the same room with these; they became a sloppy soggy mess. 

You know you lived a good childhood when your lessons in disappointment were so trivial that they were taught to you by poorly made cereal.  

Honey Nut Cheerios

Honey Nut Cheerios wasn’t for me, but I remember they advertised for it relentlessly during cartoons. That bee was always up to something, but winning over kids from cereals with bright colors, marshmallows, and chocolate wasn’t one of them.

G.I. Joe Action Stars 

One bite? Really Kid? I think the Joe’s should do a PSA on eating disorders.

Fruit Wheats

I remember these things being super gross, and this is coming from a kid that would eat almost anything if it had enough sugar in it. Mini Wheats has something similar out now, but I’m still so scarred from the foul taste of Fruit Wheats that I’m staying far away from them. See you in hell Fruit Wheats.

BONUS!

Pee Wees MR. T cereal

As a bonus, here is the greatest cinematic cereal moment in the history. 

Review: Marshmallows and Stars By Millville

The other day my lovely wife was shopping at Aldi and was so impressed by the box art for their Marshmallows and Stars cereal that she had to bring it home to show me.  The creature that they thought would most likely get a parent to buy the cereal, or a child to demand it, is a paper thin, hyper colored star fish with a giant gap-toothed grin and crazed eyes that stare off into the middle distance. If I’m going to rip off Lucky Charms, that would probably be my first choice too.

What makes the star fish choice even stranger is that Aldi is normally fine with ripping off other brand’s design’s. A trip down their aisles is a voyage into the grocery shadow world. I can’t think of any other store’s generic brands that are such blatant design rip-offs of the originals. From their Duncan Hines inspired frosting (Bakers Corner) to their version of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (You’d Butter Believe It!), they pretty much copy every design element down to the logo. To top it off, they often throw in a few name brand items into the shelf mix so you are constantly doing double takes as you attempt to buy a cheap can of beans and some marzipan.

Now don’t get me wrong, the Millville cereals are happy to indulge in these creative licenses as well, but I applaud their effort to make all of their kids cereals animal themed with a unique (and weird) design set to match.

Cracking open the box it looks like you get pretty good value for the money. Around $2 nets you 11.5 oz. of quality Lucky Charms like flavor. The cereal bits are star shaped, and the marshmallows are pretty much indecipherable blobs. The yellow ones are moons, and the red ones seem to be squares, but beyond that it’s anyone's guess.  I have to hand it to them on matching the flavor. Both wet and dry these are very similar to Lucky Charms, and in some ways a little better. They don’t seem to be quite as sweet, which can be a good thing sometimes, and the marshmallows don’t feel nearly as squeaky when you bite into them. The one area that Lucky Charms wins out in is the cereal bits. The name brand seems to be a little heartier and a little more flavorful.

If you like Lucky Charms, would like to save some money, and you don’t mind a deranged starfish nightmare or two, then I’d recommend you grab a box and chow down.

Cereals of the World: Peru

This photo was sent to me from my pal Greg (check out his great blog Can You Dig It?) taken during a recent trip to Peru.

I speculate that because Peru is below the equator, all the rules of cereal are flip flopped. The biggest name brands come in fancy bags, and bargain generics come in boxes.

I wasn’t able to sample these, but they look fun and might be good. Plus, they seem to be promoted by some kind of future angels. I can’t tell if this is supposed to be what angels eat, or if it is a gift from the heavens bestowed upon the cereal loving public. Either way I’m taking it as an endorsement that the gods are cool with my cereal habit.

If anyone has a great local cereal they’d like to share, send a photo my way and I’ll try to feature it in a future post.

Merry Chex-mas

The holiday season is upon us, which means it’s time for Chex cereals to go on sale.

I was at the store the other day and Chex was so cheap it was less than the generic, and that was also on sale!

Stock up now. Your house wants to be full of this.

Clusters Busters

Welcome!

I’ve started this blog:

• As a creative outlet
• To try to do a little more writing
• To share my love of cereal
• To shoot my mouth off about things.

Things like the modern Honey Nut Clusters cereal. A warning, I’m about to pull back the curtain on some pretty shocking stuff, so click away if you’d rather not have your world ripped apart.

Clusters cereal was always a favorite of mine. Probably in my all-time top five. Sometime in the last 10-15 years or so it became impossible to find in my town, so I would pick up a box or two whenever I came across it in my travels. It was always expensive (which I accounted for the massive amount of nuts it contained), but it was a rare treat so I paid the cost.  A few years ago it seemed to have disappeared completely, and then one day I across a box at a local supermarket.

When I had a chance to chow down on a bowl I noticed something wasn’t right. It didn’t taste bad, but it wasn’t as good as I remembered. I first thought this was because I had built it up in my head and reality was pulling me down,  but as I continued to work my way through the box the feeling that something was off persisted. I consulted with my old friend the internet and found out this shocking fact: Honey Nut Clusters no longer contained any nuts. Not a single nut was packed into those once glorious clusters. Instead they had substituted them with “almond flavoring”.  The cereal built on the ravenous desires of squirrels doing whatever they could to secure it, had cut out all of wonderful nuts. And the price I paid for the box was still incredibly high. I’ve never felt so used and abused by a cereal before. General Mills puts out some great products, but on this point I’m calling shenanigans. If you are going to pull this kind of cost cutting measure, have the common courtesy to drop the price to the consumer and the word “Nut” from the box.

As a strange side note, my two minutes of research also turned up that in 2008 they put out a limited edition box with the name “Honey Nut Clijsters” and a picture of tennis player Kim Clijsters on the box. That’s so weird I can almost forgive them for the whole nut thing, almost.

If reading about cereal is your thing, and you have the time to waste on this kind nonsense, check back here regularly, subscribe to our RSS feed, and follow us on twitter @cereal_4_dinner.

I’m also happy to include guest contributors if you have something you’d like to work up, drop me a note and we can talk.

Thanks and dig in!