The Cereal Report is a column in which PCFG conducts various cereal reviews, of new or limited products, as well as providing brief backgrounds on the cereal. Cereal is delicious and fairly cheap as far as meals go. Everyone should eat cereal!

Froot Loops is a tragic cereal. Don’t get me wrong, I really like them, but they fall into that group of kid cereals that get a bad rep due to their fairly high sugar content. Some cereals are pretty stupendously caloriffic, but Froot Loops isn’t particularly bad, featuring only 150 calories per serving with milk. It’s not really that bad for you, especially considering the sugars themselves are just plain sugar, not high fructose corn syrup, so a lot of the stigma comes from the fact they are pretty damn sweet-tasting. And I suppose sweetness isn’t for everybody, so let the people who dislike flavor stick to their plain Cheerios, but do not hold it against those of us who do enjoy partaking in sugary cereals for breakfast. (Because guess what, when you add sugar and fruits to your plain cereal, you’re not really making them that less sugary than Froot Loops.)

But I must digress, Froot Loops caught my eye the other day in the store when I saw a new iteration of them, Froot Loops Treasures.

One thing I like about Froot Loops is that they’ve been around forever. They are in the Top Tier of venerable breakfast cereals, and Toucan Sam is a total icon. That being said, the cereal hasn’t changed much ever since it was introduced in the early 1960s. They were originally released as fruit-flavored rings, and they still are. The shape hasn’t changed, like some OTHER fruity cereals (I’m looking at you, Trix, you bastards), and the colors only changed in the ’90s when green, purple, and blue were added to the original red, orange, and yellow. Once in a while you’ll see special editions come out like Froot Loops with Marshmallows, but really your main choice for eating these is just plain old Froot Loops. That’s why I was excited to see these to start making it onto shelves over the past 6 months or so.

Froot Loops Treasures, plainly speaking, is just Froot Loops with these little, fruity cereal pillows that are filled with a jelly substance in the middle. It sounds kinda simple but surprisingly they add enough to be different from the regular kind. Now, according to the official Kellogg’s canon, via the commercial for these, Toucan Sam and his nephews are investigating a legend concerning ‘the legendary Froot Loops Treasures’. Upon finding it (using a metal detector made out of Froot Loops obviously), Toucan Sam then watches his nephews dig a mysterious chest up, and they all celebrate the legend being true. Follow your nose, flavor shows, blah blah blah… So these are either ancient Froot Loops before toucans learned how to craft fruits into rings, or they’re possibly an ancient race of pillow people who are just dormant, and are now being mercilessly eaten by Toucan Sam’s nephews.

Fig 2. Cross-section of a “treasure”. (So official!)

Joking aside, the treasure pieces themselves are actually pretty good. They’re fairly large compared to the loops, and the jelly filling inside of them has a nice tart taste to them that stands out against the generic fruit flavor of the rest of the cereal. It even has a slight chewiness to it, which again is welcome in comparison to the rings which are all uniform. They’re plentiful enough to not be a throwaway gimmick, but also not too common enough to be a cheap gimmick. I would say on average, I got one pillow thing every other spoonful of the cereal. Really, I sound unimpressed, but I did actually like these things, specifically for one other reason, regarding another cereal.

This is Kellogg’s Krave, a similar concept. The pieces are all puffed cereal rectangles with a creamy chocolate filling in the middle. When I first saw these years ago, I ran out and bought a box immediately since they reminded me of a rare cereal I remembered eating as a kid, called Hidden Treasures. They were a similar concept, puffed cereal pieces, with fruit fillings in them. I figured Krave was the closest thing to them since they were discontinued during the mid ’90s. Well, Krave kiiinda sucked unfortunately. The cereal part itself was dry and flavorless, and the chocolate filling (which they seemed proud to declare was made of REAL chocolate, whoaaaa) inside was incredibly sparse to the point that you could barely taste it in some mouthfuls. Call me crazy, but I really thought a cereal whose main gimmick is chocolate filling should really have a good amount of, well, chocolate filling.

Froot Loops Treasures meanwhile harkens back some of the vague memories I had of eating Hidden Treasures. They’re as close as we’ll get for now, unless General Mills decides to bring them back. The only real difference is that these treasure pieces are all red, to signify they’re all cherry. Who the hell knows, maybe Kellogg’s will expand the cereal into its own offshoot with new flavors. Sigh… a man can dream.

Regardless, Froot Loops Treasures is the same yummy Froot Loops taste we all know and love, but the pillow-y pieces are actually a nice treat every few mouthfuls. The cereal holds up well in milk without getting soggy, and makes delightful cereal-milk, as it should; Froot Loops is renowned for its cereal-milk cereals.

Should you eat Froot Loops Treasures?

Yes