| Volume 12, Number 2 | Summer 2010 |
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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!
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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 |
Enjoy Vintage Cereal Ads On YouTube by Topher
Back To The Top Top 10 Worst-Tasting Cereals Of The Past 10 Years! by Topher
FREE INSIDE! Library Now Available Online by Topher
Back To The Top C. W. Post Cereal Reincarnated? by Topher
Back To The Top Cereal Reviews by Topher, Editor
Kellogg's Corn Flakes Touch of Honey / Toque de miel
Kellogg's Special K - Low Fat Granola
Kashi Autumn Wheat
Kashi Cinnamon Harvest
Kashi Strawberry Fields
Kashi GOLEAN Crunch
Kellogg's Frosted Flakes Gold Cereal Review by Starlet
What's New In Cereal? by Topher
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Disclaimers and Other Legal Stuff
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1. General Mill's Honey Nut Chex: The great taste of sawdust. They should have hired a beaver as a spokescharacter.
C. W. Post, an oat and honey granola cereal, was manufactured from 1975 to 1992. It was created as a testament to Post's founder Charles William "C.W." Post. The cereal still has a following, despite being missing from grocery shelves for the past 18 years. For folks looking to get their C. W. Post fix, they can find it at Cascadian Farm which produces an organic Oats and Honey Granola cereal which is quite good and tastes very similar.
In early 2010, Post extended its Pebbles lineup with Cupcake Pebbles featuring Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm on the box. It's essentially puffed riced topped with colorful candy flecks. The serving suggestion on the box features a cupcake with the pebbles sprinkled on top. Now, who doesn't want cupcakes for breakfast? Well, okay, me for one. So I gave it to my daughter to eat. What kid doesn't want to eat cupcakes for breakfast? (Just don't tell my wife). Upon opening the bag, you get a major whiff of vanilla cake. Ah, a nice start! The individual rice flakes are coated with green and red sprinkles which is very Christmasy. The cereal tastes like Rice Krispies with a very light sweetness. It has good texture as it is crispy and crunchy. It turns your milk grey but thankfully does not impart any flavor into the milk. There is no cake flavor with or without milk and is therefore a failure. I am not a Rice Krispies fan as they are too plain, but they are better than this. Post Cupcake Pebbles is worthy of but 2 boxtops (Why Bother. Leave It On Your Grocer's Shelf.).
This is an interesting box. It's one of the first fully bilingual cereal boxes I have seen in an American grocery store that wasn't an import. Oh sure, we've all seen the French and English boxes when visiting our neighbors to the north. (How's it going, eh?) But this is an English/Espanol box from a major manufacturer. Why bilingual? Marketing! According to the Pew Research Center, Hispanic and Latino Americans are populating the USA faster than all other ethic groups combined. Why Corn Flakes with Honey? According to the National Honey Board (well, who else would you ask?) honey is "one of the top sweeteners in Latino households". Kellogg's is positioning this cereal between it's unsweetened Corn Flakes and its heavy-duty Frosted Flakes Gold. "Touch" of honey is accurate. The flakes are lightly sweetened. Otherwise it's your basic Corn Flake. Coatings usually provide some sog protection. These golden, slightly glistening, flakes begin to sog about 75% through your meal, not unlike regular flakes. I appreciate that they aren't heavily sweetened, but they don't excite me either. 5 Boxtops (Middle Of The Road. You Could Do Worse.) 
Sometimes you can take a good franchise too far, and Kellogg's knows just how to do it! Kellogg's Special K - Red Berries is a real winner --- not too sweet or heavy, with a flavorful real strawberry kick. Kellogg's Special K - Low Fat Granola, with its whole grain oats, sugar, corn syrup, oat bran, rice and honey, should appeal to folks who don't want flavor to get in the way of their breakfast experience. Other than the nice crunch you get from the clusters, you're basically enjoying the flavor of dry rolled oats. It's pretty boring. 3 Boxtops ("We Have A Spill On Aisle 4". You Can Do Better.) 
General Mills owns Cascadian Farm, an organic cereal manufacturer. It's only fair that Kellogg's owns Kashi to compete in this space. Kashi Autumn Wheat is Kashi's organic version of small shredded wheat biscuits. They are unfrosted but do have a nice sweetness (unmistakably cane sugar) inside the biscuits. In fact that's all there is. Just organic whole grain wheat and evaporated cane juice. No sodium and no fats. And 6 grams (24% RDA) of dietary fiber per serving. They are much more mellow than a Frosted Mini-Wheat. Kashi biscuits are compact, but not compressed like Post's Spoon-sized. These are light, fluffy, and crispy. I crown them as the new king of the sweetened wheat biscuit. 8 Boxtops (Very Good! Recommend Purchase.) 
If plain Autumn Wheat biscuits are so good, Cinnamon biscuits have got to be tasty too, right? Cinnamon Harvest takes the same organic wheat biscuit sweetened with organic evaporated cane juice and bakes in real cinnamon. The cinnamon and sugar flavors intensify with each bite. I don't know what happened next. It's just not as satisfying as the Autumn Wheat biscuits. 7 Boxtops (Very Good! Recommend Purchase.) 
Kashi Strawberry Fields has a lot of promise: organic crispy rice and wheat flakes with organic strawberries and raspberries sweetened with evaporated cane juice. Nice! The boxes are small, just 10 ounces. I'd be lucky to get 3 bowls of cereal out of it. Rather than "Special K" sized flakes, they chose to go with the overly thick "Frosted Flakes Gold" style flakes. The raspberries are very small and almost non-existent. The strawberry slices were good sized but fewer than in Special K. It's not as good as Special K Red Berries. Thankfully, Strawberry Fields is not very sweet, but this cereal, with such a great description, disappoints. 6 Boxtops (Middle Of The Road. You Could Do Worse.) 
Why so many Kashi reviews in one issue? Simple, Kashi was on sale and my wife had coupons! So we loaded up and tried several. I should have stopped at the biscuits. GOLEAN Crunch features 7 whole grains and sesame seeds, and evaporated cane juice crystals. It's very crunchy but has a definite "stale Cracker Jack" taste to it (sans the nuts). It looks like popcorn/puffed rice/oat clusters (though there's no corn in it). The more I ate, the less I wish I ate. It got monotonous and I tossed it. 0 Boxtops (Throw away!) 
I was so happy to get a notice in my inbox that there was a new issue of "The Boxtop" ready to be savored and enjoyed just like a bowl of my fave cereal. I also read your prior review of Frosted Flakes Gold and wanted to add my two flakes. Frosted Flakes Gold is one of my new faves. I like the sweet stuff --- especially layered on top of another less sweet cereal. I like to eat Product 19, Corn Chex, Corn Flakes, or Crispix underneath. I also really like to layer Frosted Flakes Gold, Cinnamon Life, and Annie's Cinna Bunnies...yum! It's a cinnamon-y, honey-yummy bowl of cereal! I only put a little bit of each kind in my bowl so that the cereal doesn't get mushy. I eat, add a little more of one kind then the next as I go along. It's good! As far as adding some crunchy oat or nut nuggets, I am really glad Frosted Flakes Gold doesn't have these as they always seem to add extra fat (it takes oil to hold the nuggets together) and calories to my cereal bowl. I prefer fat-free or low-fat cereals, and I prefer cereals that get their fat from whole grains rather than added oil. On a scale of 1 to 10 boxtops I give Frosted Flakes Gold a 9. I really like it. (A Classic! Belongs On Every Breakfast Table.)
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