Volume 11, Number 1

Spring 2009

Welcome to "The Boxtop", your cereal netletter. Grab your favorite box of cereal and pour yourself a bowl. Entire page will load long before your cereal turns soggy. Select a topic from among the links on the Side Panel or jump right into one of our feature articles. Just add milk and enjoy! We'd like to offer you a Free Subscription to get e-mail notices of each new issue. Your comments and suggestions are encouraged.

Side Panel Monthly Ingredients Cereal Review Feature Articles What's New in Cereal? Perpetually Updated Cereal Ratings Cereal Ideas Letters to the Editor Meet the Staff Topher Ellis, Editor Back Issues Complete Index Links Favorite Cereal Links Subscribe Free Subscription Stuck in a Frame? Click to Break Free Privacy Policy And Ethics Code Disclaimers And Other Legal Stuff Back To The Top

Spring 2009 Index Articles: 1. Celebrating Our 11th Anniversary Issue of "The Boxtop" 2. Kevin Meisner's "Freakie Magnet" Magazine Finds a New Home 3. CerealBits.com Adds Cereal Box Gallery 4. The Sugar and Honey Cereal Museums on Flickr Cereal Reviews: 1. Barbara's Bakery Shredded Wheat 2. Post LiveActive Harvest Nut Crunch 3. Kellogg's Indiana Jones 4. Kellogg's Keebler Cookie Crunch 5. General Mill's Multi-Bran Chex 6. General Mill's Honey Nut Chex 7. Kellogg's Frosted Mini-Wheats Little Bites Honey Nut 8. Kellogg's Frosted Mini-Wheats Little Bites Chocolate What's New in Cereal? 1. General Mills Vintage Cereal Tee-Shirts for $5 2. Kellogg's Cereal Promotions Send Us Your News Celebrating Our 11th Anniversary Issue of "The Boxtop" by Topher We've been publishing "The Boxtop" since 1999. In these past 11 years, we've honestly reviewed over six dozen cereals, identified several new cereal related products and toys, and helped folks track down information on cereal premiums. We've presented new ideas for cereal box concepts, and invited readers to share their Great Ideas for a New Cereal. The Boxtop Cereal Netletter is a natural extension of Topher's Breakfast Cereal Character Guide loaded with over 1,000 different characters from your favorite cereals from the past 120 years. Back To The Top Kevin Meisner's "Freakie Magnet" Magazine Finds a New Home by Topher Kevin Meisner has asked Topher's Breakfast Cereal Character Guide to host his "Freakie Magnet" Magazine archive. We have lovingly rebuilt his familiar "Freakie Magnet" Magazine website and stocked it full of PDF files of his entire run of Freakie Magnet magazines for your reading and research pleasure. Please join us at The Freakie Magnet. Back To The Top CerealBits.com Adds Cereal Box Gallery by Topher CerealBits [2017 editor's note: site no longer active], the premier cereal box collecting forum has recently added a cereal box gallery. The CerealBits Box Gallery is a collaborative effort amongst cereal box collectors to build an outstanding image gallery of complete cereal boxes in high resolution. The gallery got up and running in early 2009 and is getting more comprehensive every day. Visit the gallery and add your cereal box images. Back To The Top The Sugar and Honey Cereal Museums on Flickr by Topher Here are two more repositories of cereal box and related cereal merchandise images. Sugar Frosted Cereal Museum [1939-1989]. "This virtual museum is home to anything related to vintage kiddie cereal from 1939 (the first year for sugar coated cereal with Ranger Joe) to 1989. Boxes, premiums, advertising displays, ads, original art from the ad studios, and even old photographs of cereal is what the museum is looking for. Everyone is encouraged to participate as long as it's vintage and that it's from your own collection". Honey Frosted Cereal Museum [1990-Present]. This is a sister group to the Sugar Frosted Cereal Museum. "Here is where you can post cereal related imagery for anything produced in the year 1990 or after. Post boxes, premiums, licensed merchandise, animation cells. Whatever you'd like!" Back To The Top Cereal Reviews by Topher, Editor Barbara's Bakery Shredded Wheat Shredded Wheat was the invention of Henry Perky of Denver, Colorado in the late 19th century. They intended to sell biscuit-making machines but the cereal itself proved more popular. Read the whole story here. Barbara's Bakery Shredded Wheat is what classic Shredded Wheat is all about. Nice big wheels of lightly spun golden wheat. No sugar. Nice flavor. Sogs relatively slowly in milk but you want it wet to best enjoy it. I rate Barbara's Bakery Shredded Wheat at 8 Boxtops (Very Good! Recommend Purchase.) Post LiveActive Harvest Nut Crunch The entire name of this cereal is Post LiveActive for Digestive Health with 3G Prebiotic Fiber per serving Harvest Nut Crunch. It's a mouthful and so are the whole grain flakes with lightly sweetened crunchy clusters, almonds, pecans, and walnuts. Prebiotic Fiber is supposedly a special type of fiber that helps your body stay balanced and healthy by working with your body to produce more beneficial bacteria and helping to naturally regulate digestion. In June of 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced the recall of 12,553 cases of Post-brand LiveActive Mixed Berry Crunch (the sister cereal to Harvest Nut Crunch) due to a labeling error because the cereal might contain undeclared tree nuts, such as almonds, pecans or walnuts, posing a health risk to people who are allergic to nuts. The big clusters are awesome but the cereal, like many of Post's offerings, is a little too sweet for me. I rate LiveActive Harvest Nut Crunch at 6½ Boxtops (Middle Of The Road. You Could Do Worse. But Buy A Box And Give It A Try.) Kellogg's Indiana Jones Kellogg's released this cereal last year in connection with the May 23, 2008 release of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull". This great looking box with a very young Indiana Jones is full of crunchy chocolate oat-and-corn balls and themed marshmallows consisting of skulls, torches, the Temple of Akator, and Indy's hat. (Think: Cocoa Puffs with marbits). The only thing that would have made this cereal worse is if they had tossed in some raisins. There is nothing wrong with the cereal if you like chocolate cereals. The box is certainly a collectable but alas, the cereal is not. I rate Kellogg's Indiana Jones at 6 Boxtops after picking out the marbits. (Middle Of The Road. You Could Do Worse.) Kellogg's Keebler Cookie Crunch Kellogg's, which also owns the Keebler cookie franchise, had the great idea to extend this brand to the cereal aisle. Two Keebler cookie favorites, Fudge Stipes (O's representing about 90% of the contents) and Chips Deluxe (round flats), fill the box. The cereal is made with real cookie pieces and dark chocolatey cookie bits. This fun box features 7 Keebler Elves. Ernie is on the front with Buckets, Fast Eddie, Ma, Doc, Leonardo, and Elmer on the back. The cereal smells like Keebler Fudge Stripe Cookies and is very lightweight --- it floats in milk. Dry, the cereal has a light cookie taste. Poor on milk and you can enjoy the creamy cheap off-chocolate fudge flavor. As a bonus, your milk is turned a light chocolate. I rate Keebler Cookie Crunch 10 Boxtops for concept and 5 Boxtops for taste (Middle Of The Road. You Could Do Worse.) General Mill's Multi-Bran Chex "Oven toasted Chex with a hint of sweetness". When they say "multi-bran" they aren't kidding. It's got wheat bran, rice bran, and corn bran. It has a nice texture. It's very crispy and crunchy. Doesn't taste sweet like frosted cereals do. It has a very subtile malt flavor. The Chex sink in milk but do not impart any flavor or color into the milk. I rate General Mill's Multi-Bran Chex 9 Boxtops (A Classic! Belongs On Every Breakfast Table.) General Mill's Honey Nut Chex I am a really big fan of Chex cereals. We even make Chex mix every Christmas. All I can say is "Wow!" They really messed up with this variety of Chex. This is a sickenly sweet Corn Chex cereal with a discernible almond flavoring. The more I ate them, the more I hated them. They are very crispy at first but rapidly dissolve in milk producing a top-notch case of soggies. General Mills ought to get a beaver as a spokescharacter due to the sawdust taste you'll encounter half way through the bowl. I rate General Mill's Honey Nut Chex 00 Boxtops (Throw away!) Kellogg's Frosted Mini-Wheats Little Bites Kellogg's has a shredded wheat cereal for every mouth. Frosted and unfrosted. Flavored or unflavored. They have Mini-Wheats, Mini-Wheats Big Bite, Mini-Wheats Bite-sized, and now Mini-Wheats Little Bites, and they come in two flavors: Honey Nut, and Chocolate. Little Bites are about half the size of a Bite-Size Mini Wheat but they have all the texture and flavor. It's a high fiber cereal (6g per serving) that's easy to eat. While the Honey Nut smell awful in the box, they taste pretty darn good with milk. I rate the Frosted Mini-Wheats Little Bites Honey Nut at 7 Boxtops (Very Good! Recommend Purchase.) The Chocolate version has a combination milk chocolate and cocoa flavor. These too are crispy crunchy with good texture. If you are a chocolate cereal lover, you should enjoy these. Me? I still haven't found a chocolate cereal I really like. I rate the Frosted Mini-Wheats Little Bites Chocolate at 5 Boxtops (Middle Of The Road. You Could Do Worse.) Back To The Top What's New In Cereal? by Topher General Mills Vintage Cereal Tee-Shirts for $5 Once again, retro boxes of Cheerios, Honey Nut Cheerios, Lucky Charms, Trix, and Cocoa Puffs cereals are showing up on shelves at Target. Each box has an offer to buy tee-shirts featuring vintage cereal logos. In addition to the 5 cereals mentioned, you can also get a Kix or Boo-Berry T-shirt. You can find the offer on specially marked boxes of these General Mills retro cereal boxes. Each T-shirt is free with 5 codes found inside the vintage boxes, or $5, plus $3-$4 per shirt shipping and handling. You can order up to five T-shirts per day, while supplies last. We ordered 4 T-shirts at a cost of $20 plus a hefty $14 shipping and handling. They arrived in an impressively speedy 3 days rather than the 3-to-4 weeks promised. Certainly not the highest quality shirts or printing, they are comfortable after washing but shrink at least a full size, so order at least one size larger. Maybe next year, they'll contract with Monkey In A Dryer Screen Printing Company to handle the promotion. Kellogg's Cereal Promotions Kellogg's has a site where you can check all of their cereal promotions. Free-inside, Internet, and Mail-in offers are all presented at: Kellogg's Promotions Send Us Your News If you notice anything new in your supermarket cereal isle, or wish to report a new cereal development, please email us. We'll give you credit for your information, or keep it confidential, at your request. Thank you. Back To The Top E-Mail the Editor We appreciate any comments you may have. © 2009 Boxtop Editor Edited 2017 All rights reserved. (Make a donation). Disclaimers and Other Legal Stuff The Boxtop is a non-commercial publication. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by any cereal or company. All of the names, characters, brands, and icons included here are trademarks of their respective parent companies and cannot be used for commercial purposes. Enjoy breakfast and support your favorite characters! Opinions expressed are those of the writer, which like most things having to do with cereal may not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Editor, anyone else on the staff, or the world at large. A good sense of humor is appreciated. Material in this publication may not be reproduced in any form without written permission from the Editor. All information contained herein was obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but we cannot guarantee its accuracy or completeness. "The Boxtop", "Crunchy Nuggets for the Cerealist", "Cerealist", "Cereal Netletter", "Topher's Castle", "Topher's Castle - A Great Site for Everyone", "Topher's Breakfast Cereal Character Guide", "Breakfast Cereal Character Guide", and "Cereal Character Guide" as well as our masthead graphics are all trademarks of Topher. Back To The Top

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