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Today’s cereal video started with a fan request. And then we visited a Walmart in Virginia on our way home from a wedding and found a Limited Edition cereal to compare it to.

Apple Cinnamon Cheerios are a General Mills whole grain oat cereal. They taste like Cheerios always taste, but with a delicious cinnamon coating. The apple isn’t very noticeable, but the cereal is very tasty. Also, thanks to Kung Fu Panda 2, there was a toy inside the box. If NYCWD had been in the room the cereal would have received 5 bowls for that alone. Apple Cinnamon Cheerios also gets pluses for a good box and bag opening, a perfect sog, and real apple puree in its ingredients. Deductions are for having wheat but not listing it as an allergen and being high in sugars while being low on fiber and protein.



Post Pebbles Boulders are listed as being Stone Age Caramel Apple flavor. It smells like apple, it kinda tastes like apple, but it definitely tastes like sticky caramel sugar that will rot your teeth before you can even finish grabbing for your toothbrush. Its nutrition information is pretty comparable to Apple Cinnamon Cheerios but boasts whole grain corn flour as well as whole grain oat flour. Kudos to Post for listing wheat so those allergic will quickly be able to see they should stay away from this one. Too bad the taste knocked out any positive. I feel generous in the number of bowls I gave this cereal. Despite its claim to having less sugar than Honey Nut Cheerios, it tastes like a big bowl of sweet yucky. Also, what’s up with the bones? I know it’s a Flintstones based cereal, but I don’t eat bones. Ew. Dude.

Apple Cinnamon Cheerios

Taste: Deliciously cinnamon oat goodness
Box opening: Good
Bag rippage: A little tough to get in the bag but it didn’t rip
Bag slippage: None, and a toy came flying out! Bonus!
Sog factor: Unsoggy
Allergy alert: No listed allergens, but there’s wheat in there

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about Apple Cinnamon Cheerios visit Cheerios.

Pebbles Boulders Stone Age Caramel Apple

Taste: Like apple, but with a really strange and sweet tang
Box opening: A little rip.
Bag rippage: Tough
Bag slippage: No slip
Sog factor: Unsoggy
Allergy alert: Wheat is listed as its ownly “Contains” ingredient

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about Pebbles Stone Age Caramel Apple Boulders visit Post.

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Cinnamon Burst Cheerios are a new flavor of corn and oat O’s by General Mills. Despite its claim of bursting with real cinnamon, there’s nothing bursting about it. The flavor is almost exactly like Apple Jacks before being added to milk. After the milk is poured it takes on a flavorless slime quality that is not pleasant in the least.

Nutrition facts improve my overall rating:

With 20% of your daily value of fiber in a single serving, I give Cinnamon Burst Cheerios a full extra bowl than I would for all other plusses put together. You lucked out with that one detail.

Better flavor luck next time, Cheerios.

Taste: Tastes like Apple Jacks before the sog. Tastes straight up nasty after.
Box opening: A little hard, and the box ripped!
Bag rippage: It was tough to get into, but it did not rip.
Bag slippage: Um, YUP.
Sog factor: It sogged out in a very gross way.
Allergy alert: Contains wheat and oats

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about Cinnamon Burst Cheerios visit the Cheerios website.

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B-a-n-a-n-a-s! Go bananas! B-a-n-a-n-a-s! Go bananas! B-a-n-a-n-a-s! Go bananas!!

And that, ladies and gentleman, was the official cheer of Yawgoog Scout Reservation Camp Sandy Beach where I learned to love the banana.

(Clearly Poppy didn’t have a similar experience.)

Banana Nut Cheerios is a corn and oat based cereal by General Mills. It has that classically familiar Cheerios shape. The cereal is naturally flavored with real banana and natural banana flavor. Out of the box it has a strong banana flavor before the sog with a slight hint of nut. After the sog the cereal remains pretty crunchy but the banana flavor is more subtle, and actually more pleasant. If you go bananas over bananas eat the whole bowl quickly.

Banana Nut Cheerios stack up similarly in nutrition to its sister flavors:

The cereal is low in fat but also unfortunately low in fiber and protein.

For being a Cheerio powerful in flavor, but leaving a lot to be desired for box design and lack of a mascot, Banana Nut Cheerios gets less than the full stack of bowls.

Taste: STRONGLY of bananas, until it sogs to a more subtle flavor
Box opening: Easy
Bag rippage: None
Bag slippage: None
Sog factor: Remained crunchy
Allergy alert: Almond and wheat ingredients

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about Banana Nut Cheerios please visit the Cheerios site.

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Today let’s talk about Chocolate Cheerios. This is a new flavor of the very popular General Mills breakfast cereal. Remember when we were kids and there were two kinds of Cheerios — plain or honey nut? Did you know that as of the time of this post there are eleven types of Cheerios?! So, logically, chocolate had to be thrown in there somewhere at some point in time, and that time is now!

How does Chocolate Cheerios get its chocolatey taste? From real cocoa! The Cheerios are two-toned: some are a lighter chocolate and some are deep, dark chocolate. I see no information about why this is the case, but I’m guessing there is less chocolate on the lighter chocolate Cheerios, considering those Cheerios taste sweet but not as chocolatey as the darker chocolate Cheerios. The cereal overall has the scent of Cookie Crisp and does kind of taste like it as well, but as I thought more about what I was tasting it really tastes more like Reese’s Puffs without the peanut butter… so, like Cocoa Puffs! Which makes sense since General Mills also makes Cocoa Puffs!

Chocolate Cheerios throws a few healthy tidbits at you: it’s low in fat and contains whole-grain oats which may reduce the risk of heart disease.It claims to be a good source of Calcium and Vitamin D, but that just means it has 10% of each. I think I found more Calcium under my couch cushion yesterday. (That was a joke.) It does have a few other good-for-you nutrients in it, so let’s recap:

Bag opening was really tough. Also, despite being part squirrel as the result of a childhood squirrel bite incident, I truly did not enjoy the fact that the sticky coating on the cereal allowed the Chocolate Cheerios to squirrel away between my teeth and my cheeks. Hard to chew when you have to strategize about how to use your tongue to pull cereal out of the dark corners of your mouth… Also, despite claiming to be really awesome for you it was much lower in the important-to-Poppy nutrients such as Protein and Fiber.

Taste: Like Cocoa Puffs with a hint of “healthy”
Box opening: Easy peasy
Bag rippage: None, but opening the bag was HARD!
Bag slippage: None
Sog factor: Crunchy and sticky sogging to perfectly textured but a little too sticky
Allergy alert: Contains wheat

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about the cereal please visit the Cheerios website.

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Welcome to this bad hair day, just rolled out of bed-looking, Marbits edition of CEREAL WEDNESDAY! *cheer* In this week’s episode I, Poppy, share my most favorite childhood snack with you: hot buttered Cheerios!

We’ve covered this General Mills cereal in its breakfast form before, but here’s a refresher: All by their lonesome Cheerios is a heart healthy cereal with three grams of soluble fiber per 28 gram serving. Also packed into that cup of goodness is 100 calories, 3 grams of protein, lots of vitamins and minerals, as well as whole grain oats and oat fiber.

Then the Cheerios are brought to that upper echelon of deliciousness with a tablespoon of butter! In that serving of Land O Lakes there are 100 calories, 11 grams of fat, and 30 milligrams of cholesterol.

Yes, this version of Cheerios is very bad for you because of the butter. But it’s a fun, savory snack food!! And all the good for you stuff is still in there somewhere… just coated with a little bit of artery hardener.

And now, the recipe:

1 cup Cheerios
1 Tablespoon butter

Place Cheerios in a microwave-safe bowl. Place butter in solid form on top of Cheerios. Place bowl in microwave and heat on high for 45 to 60 seconds. Remove bowl, stir Cheerios-butter mixture. EAT! Preferably hot.

I know you’ll love this tasty treat as much as I do, unless you have some strange aversion to awesome goodness.

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

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So we’ve already talked about the Original Cheerios. Then we talked about the most popular Honey Nut Cheerios. We even talked about Honey Nut Cheerios Breakfast Bars. So what is there left to possibly say about Fruity Cheerios? Alot actually.

Fruity Cheerios was only brought into the market by General Mills in 2006. The Cheerios brand has no notable mascot, but rather bases its marketing plan in an appeal to mother’s for a healthy breakfast choice for their children. Fruity Cheerios is no different, but the colorful box is eerily reminiscent of Kelloggs’ Froot Loops, minus the talking bird.

The Fruity Cheerios claim to have 25% less sugar than the “Most Popular Fruity Cereal” (*COUGH*Froot Loops*COUGH*), appears to be true. Here is how the math basically breaks down:

• •32g serving of Froot Loops has 15g Sugars
• •27g serving of Fruity Cheerios has 9g Sugars
• •9g Sugars divided into 27g of Fruity Cheerios equals 1g of Sugars per 3g of Fruity Cheerios
• •Therefore 33g of Fruity Cheerios would equate to 11g of Sugars
• •11g/15g= .733333 which rounds out to 73% of the Sugars represented

Thus Fruity Cheerios, according to my calculations, actually has 27% less Sugars than Froot Loops, living up to their claim. The box opened well, the bag opened like silk, bag slippage was minimal, and the soggies were held at bay for at least 5 minutes during milk contamination. So why in the end did I only give it 4 Bowls?

Just like Fruity Pebbles, every singly colorful Fruity Cheerios tastes the same. There is no taste difference between the orange, purple, or greenish Ohs. They all taste the same. The final nail in the coffin… as it is with most cereals… there was no toy. Just some really lame games on the back of the box.

So in conclusion, with less sugar, more mom appeal, and a decent fruity flavor, Fruity Cheerios is sure to find its way onto breakfast tables nationwide with ease.

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information you can visit the Fruity Cheerios Cereal Page

The T-shirt for this episode was provided by the Second Hand Tryptophan Store

The result is an over sweetened assault on your taste buds worse than a bag of candy. One thing that does come out more in the bar is the aftertaste of nuts, assuming you did not go into a diabetic coma after the sweetness. The bar also does not do a good job satisfying a morning appetite, leaving you feeling empty an hour or two later.

Considering that the caloric count of a bar is equal to that of a bowl of the actual cereal, you may want to choose instead to take a few minutes to enjoy the original as it was intended instead of rushing out the door with a bar in hand.

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

Honey Nut Cheerios was introduced in 1979. It is actually the most popular variant of the cereal, having had the ability to blend the healthy aspect with the sweetness and undoubtedly thanks to the television advertising using a Bee as the mascot. Unbelievably, the Bee was actually nameless until 2000 when 11 year old Kristin Tong from Texas won a contest to name him. Henceforth, he has been known as Buzzbee… or just Buzz for short. While Buzzbee is a popular mascot, I tend to think they would have done better using The Queen Bee to target the male 16-99 demographic.

So why is soluble fiber so important? Soluble fiber can help lower your cholesterol when eaten regularly as part of your diet. Honey Nut Cheerios has taken this to heart (literally and figuratively) and have expanded their marketing beyond the Saturday morning cartoon commercials featuring Buzz into commercials targeting the high cholesterol age set of over 55. Along with this marketing change, Honey Nut Cheerios has also been certified by the American Heart Association as a food with heart healthy levels of fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol.

Overall, Honey Nut Cheerios is a good choice for breakfast, and I have to concur with my special guest, The Queen Bee, that it is worthy of getting a 5 Bowl Rating.

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

Special thanks goes to The Queen Bee for joining me in tasting the cereal and for letting me film inside her hive. Before I get inundated with e-mails… no… she is NOT single or available. If your lucky… maybe she’ll be your friend.

For more information you can visit the Honey Nut Cheerios Cereal Page.

Cheerioats originated back in 1941. It was the first OAT based ready to eat out of the box cereal. Four years later, in 1945, they changed the name to the familiar Cheerios. In 1948 Cheerios begins its mass marketing by sponsoring the popular television show, The Lone Ranger. Cheerios continued commercializing their cereal with other popular characters including Bullwinkle the Moose and UnderDog.

Cheerios actually has had a few mascots of their own. They started with Cheeri O’Leary in 1942, a cartoon who provided biographical information on movie stars of the era. Then between 1953 and 1973 there was The Cheerios Kid and Sue. Usually Sue played the damsel in distress, and sort of like Popeye it was up to The Cheerios Kid to save her, thanks to Cheerios of course.

General Mills has spun the Cheerios brand off into many different versions, including Millenios during the 1999-2000 millennium celebration. Cheerios marketing has relied less on self-developed characters, but more on commercial sponsorships and licensing. Because of this, they also go for spans of time with little to no promotional advertising and are dependent on their nutritional value and the endorsement of moms across America.

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information you can visit the Official Cheerios website.