Cereal Eats: Jolly Rancher Cereal, Reviewed. | Serious Eats

– Hi and welcome to another Serious Eats cereal review. (calm music) My name is Jamelle Bouie. I’m a New York Times political columnist and I also eat sugary cereals and talk about them. This month, we have Jolly Ranchers Cereal based off of, inspired by the Jolly Ranchers candy.

I’ve never tasted it even though it’s open and I opened it just to fill the bowl we have right over here and that bowl has been sitting for a couple minutes. That’s because it’s the last bowl in the test we’re gonna do.

We do several tests before I give you a verdict on this cereal. A few notes on this cereal. It appears to be very sugary and I’m guessing because it’s based off of Jolly Rancher, it’s supposed to not just be sweet and fruity but a little bit sour as well which is an interesting approach to have for a cereal.

Now, in case you care about the nutrition facts of something like this, it has 12 grams of added sugars, about a quarter of your daily recommended value. So definitely what you’d call a dessert cereal maybe.

Not something I think would be great for breakfast although as you can see this is a family size and so I guess General Mills must assume that you’ll be feeding this to a gaggle of children. Sounds like a bad idea but that’s just what I think.

Okay, so let’s get started with the smell test first. Again, I have not tried these at all. I have no idea what they’re gonna smell or taste like. Maybe a little bit like Trix or Froot Loops. I’m gonna try some dry ones.

I’m just gonna get a handful here. I have three reds and a blue so let’s give these a try. I can’t identify a particular flavor here. It’s just sort of like generic fruity. I guess we’re looking at watermelon, apple, blueberry, grape and cherry but I can’t really distinguish any of those flavors whatsoever.

It’s nice and crunchy. Let’s try them as normal. Milk here. This is oat milk. These just, I mean, they don’t have much of a sour taste or anything. They’re not a tart taste. I’ve not had a Jolly Rancher in forever either so I could not tell you but they’re fine.

They’re like a fruity cereal. If fruity cereal is your thing then I think you might enjoy these. They taste way better with the milk than they do dry I think. I think, to the extent that there is, it’s sort of like sour, tangy or whatever taste to them.

The milk offsets that. So definitely have these with milk. These aren’t much of a dry snacking cereal. We have our bowl that’s been soaking. Let’s try that. They don’t taste that much different and they hold up way better than most cereals I’ve tried this far.

If you look at them, they’re pretty large for a cereal and they’re pretty thick I guess is what you’d say and so the milk has not actually soaked through all the way and so it leaves them with a pretty good consistency after I guess this has been about six or seven minutes.

Not bad. Now I’m gonna taste the milk. Doesn’t leave much of a flavor or maybe what it is is that all the fruity flavors have sort of just melded into one and it’s not really very distinctive. It’s fine.

I don’t think if I were eating a whole bowl of this I would have the milk afterwards. It’s not like a Cinnamon Toast Crunch milk or a Cocoa Pebbles milk or something that really does taste quite good afterwards but it’s not bad either and I think that’s gonna be my verdict for these.

I wouldn’t say that they’re pretty good and that might just be because I don’t particularity prefer fruity cereals. I like cinnamon flavored cereals. I like sort of chocolate flavored cereals, honey flavored cereals.

So this fruit thing isn’t really my jam but these aren’t a bad option. I mean, I’m a little shocked. I expected Jolly Rancher Cereal to be truly awful and instead it’s just fine. It does what it sets out to do and so with that in mind, given that there clearly is this goal of kind of to reproduce the flavor of a Jolly Rancher and to provide a good novel fruity cereal, I think it does both of those things just fine and so that’s three spoons out of five.

Congratulation, Jolly Rancher Cereal. Of these, you’re the one I think I might like the most. Well, thank you for watching. We’ll be back next month with another cereal. Not sure what it’s gonna be. Hopefully it’ll be as good as this one but probably not unfortunately.