The Breakfast Food of Champions

There is a trend in the food industry to take every imaginable breakfast food and either shrink it, freeze it, make it toaster-slot accessible, or--the Holy Grail of breakfast processing--to turn it into a cereal.  Things we never envisioned being saturated in milk, now float comfortably in our bowls.  Foods like French toast and chocolate chip cookies have invaded breakfast with both appetizing and questionable results.  Before you can say snap, crackle and pop, we will be eating Kellogg’s Bacon ‘N Egg Bits - part of a complete breakfast.

At the heart of the cereal business is the flake, which has been sugar frosted, honey roasted, almond sliced, and cinnamon sugared to death five times over. Yet there is just no getting over the fact that a flake is just that--a shred of ground up grain that quickly becomes soggy in milk. To remedy this inherent weakness, new cutting edge cereals are being developed every year. Thus far, tireless engineers at these companies have provided such technological advancements as the circle, the puff, and the pebble.

Each variety has its own strengths and weaknesses.  Puffs to a better job in retaining internal flavors such as chocolate, fruit, and peanut butter, though they lack the adhesiveness to hold on to such external flavors as nuts and apple bits, which the circle excels at.  Pebbles, well, pebbles aren’t good for much, and generally turn to multi-colored oatmeal within seconds.

Of course, some are not satisfied with the proven trifecta of chocolate, fruit and peanut butter flavored cereals, and prefer to try out new ideas--to “shake things up” so to speak. One of the biggest breakthroughs in cereal technology was the addition of marshmallows.  The kernel for the genius of marshmallows goes back to the infamous “Raisin Bran Theory,” which states that adding any external, non-grain item to a cereal will make it taste better.  Though countless others have tried, no one has come up with a more enduring marshmallow cereal than Lucky Charms.

The new hot guns on the market are trying furiously to garner the consumer’s interest with such products as cereal laced with sprinkles and Pop Rocks. Seriously.  As long as you do not mind walking through a grocery store with a box of “Powerpuff Girls Cereal” tucked under your arm, you can now enjoy the pleasures of Pop Rocks while eating your cereal.  Of course, the sanity of people who add Pop Rocks to cereal must be seriously questioned .

Of course, no one would buy a cereal if they did not have confidence in the cartoon character hawking the product.  Fortunately, no one creates corporate mascots quite like cereal companies. Over the years they have given us such memorable figures as the paranoid “Lucky” and his Lucky Charms, the hyperactive Sunny and his Coco Puffs, and the ever-diligent Trix Rabbit.  And who can forget the General Mills gothic-themed cereals plugged by the immortal Count Chocula, Boo Berry, and Frankenberry—the famous undead purveyors of sugary starch?  Although, when you think about it, a vampire with only one fang is really odd.