Like Eating Nasty, Sweetened Cement

I am more than willing to do stupid things for this website, especially when it comes to food. Whenever I hear of new fast food items I’ll go out of my way to get them (Burger King Million Dollar Whoppers, Wendy's Krabby Patty Kollab Meal). If there’s a weird, strange snack I come across, I absolutely need to try it (Lay's Roaring Ranch & Friend Pickle Chips, Herr's Stubb's Sticky Sweet Cheese Curls). And if we’re talking sweet treats, I’m absolutely down to test the most disgusting sounding stuff just to see if there’s some missing magic we couldn’t have expected (Warheads Soda, Oreos Coca-Cola Flavored Cookies). I eat these things so you don’t have to.

I have seen, for the last few months, the General Mills’ Loaded Cereals available on shelves, but I wasn’t instantly interested in trying them. Breakfast cereal is fun (as per my one, two, three round-ups of them), but I also only have cravings for cereal once in a while. Plus, unlike with other snacks, where I can often get stuff in just a single snack bag or a single meal, boxes of cereal are generally quite big and if I end up not liking something that leads to a lot of wasted food. I really dislike wasting food when I can help it. As such I was waiting for just the right flavor of Loaded Cereal to come out to pique my interest. And the company managed it, as we’ll soon cover.

For those not instantly in the know, Loaded Cereals essentially mini-biscuits of cereal stuffed with a bit of dry icing to make a “loaded” experience. The first flavors were based on existing flavors, such as Loaded Trix, Loaded Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Loaded Cocoa Puffs. Over time a bunch of other flavors came along, like Birthday Cake, Nesquik, and S’Mores, and it’s pretty clear these are popular enough (at least with kids) that the cereals are selling well and General Mills wants to keep expanding the line.

That’s where the flavor I tried comes in. I saw the row of boxes on the shelf and what instantly drew my eye was Loaded Chocolate Strawberry. Breakfast cereals in general already walk a fine line of being loaded sugar bombs while trying to pass themselves off as “healthy”. But every once in a while you see one that clearly knows its candy and isn’t even trying to say otherwise, and chocolate strawberry cereal sounds like candy. Plus, it doesn’t even sound good. I was instantly attracted to it because, as I said to my wife, “this sounds absolutely dreadful.” I had to try it.

Getting it home and ripping open the box (actually literally because I failed to track which end of the box was up and opened it along the bottom, like a monster) the first thing I noted was that it smelled a lot like Crunch Berries. It makes sense, really, because that cereal is just artificially flavored grain puffs made to taste vaguely of berries, and what we have here is artificially flavored grain puffs made to taste vaguely of berries. It’s basically the same thing. And the first few pieces I popped in my mouth also tasted like Crunch Berries, so we clearly knew what kind of “strawberry” flavor we were working with.

There were a couple of notes that were different. These puffs aren’t quite as crunchy as Captain Crunch’s berries, which I actually think is a poor note for these. You want cereal that holds up well in milk and these are soft enough puffs that if you left them for any time they’d get pretty soggy in milk. Also, the chocolate flavor isn’t at all forward when you eat these, coming more at the back end in a way that almost mars the favor. I think if these strawberry puffs had the vanilla creme that’s the default in so many other Loaded Cereals it would have tasted better. It wasn’t that bad but it certainly wasn’t great.

Where the cereal really falls apart for me is when I had a bowl of it in milk. There was something off about the taste. It was too much. Too sweet, too sickly, and not very good at all. And it gets worse the more you eat it. By the end of the bowl I actually felt a little sick, like the cloying fake strawberry flavor was dominating my system and making my stomach turn. And bear in mind, I love Crunch Berries (which, as I noted above, have a similar flavor). Something about the mix of cereal, sugar, and flavoring just doesn’t work here. In a small dose, a few little pieces to pop, it works great, but not for a whole bowl (or even a whole box).

Also, yes, the milk does make the cereal too damp and kind of gross. They start out fine, as all cereals do, but very quickly the pieces get soggy and lose their crunch. By the end it felt like I was chewing wet cement, which was even more prevalent when the cereal felt heavy on my stomach. Nothing about a bowl of this cereal and milk worked, and by the time I was done I knew I couldn’t eat any more of these at all. The fake flavor, the soft biscuits, the way it all felt so gross and heavy… yeah, I was done.

And because of that I don’t even want to try any of the other Loaded flavors. Sure, I went into this one because I assumed it could be gross, but it wasn’t gross in the expected way that would make me say, “well I clearly picked the wrong flavor this time.” There are elements to this flavor that could work, in the right mix and with the right bit of crunch. But this cereal’s components all fail, not just in flavor but in construction, too. There’s probably a version that tastes better, but it would likely be still as cloyingly sweet, due to the central bit of icing, and it would get just as gross when milk is applied. I don’t think there’s any saving this.

So yeah, I get that these are weirdly popular right now, but I just don’t know why. Even accepting I picked the wrong flavor to start with, these are still nasty as all hell. So much worse than I could have expected in all the wrong ways. Not only is this specific flavor a hard pass but I think the whole line of Loaded Cereals needs to go back to formula. The basic construction is bad, and it only gets worse from there.