Whether it’s Blue Moon ice cream or a glass of cold water at 3:00 a.m., some things have flavors that defy conventional description. Adjectives hardly do them justice. And to me, this is a great thing. The best part of exploring eccentric foodstuffs is having a taste take the words out of your mouth and stuff appetizing abstractions in their place.

That’s not to say Caramel Apple Jacks are mind-bogglingly good—just that this review is about to be a real struggle because we’re dealing with some serious fourth-dimensional stuff right here.

It doesn’t help that even regular Apple Jacks have a complicated history of not including apple ingredients, then quietly adding them recently—even though the loops are still way cinnamon heavy. So muddling the mix even more with caramel, whose flavor is best described as “caramelized,” only makes my job harder.

Regardless, this is basically the first ever meaningful variant of Apple Jacks (save for Cinnamon Jacks) that didn’t just change the pieces’ shapes or color, so I have to try my darnedest to wrangle up a crew of strapping young sentences and hogtie this taste down.

Let’s address the Dillenia indica in the room: though Caramel Apple Jacks contain both dried apples and apple juice concentrate, the apple taste is very subtle, tapering off from a strong first tang into a more generic sweetness, as the caramel plays its calypso. If you were expecting apple to be represented coequally in each spoonful, well, I hope your taste buds have better reaction times than mine. By the time I processed the strangely generic “roastiness” also prefixing every bite, apple was a memory shrinking in my rearview mirror. Considering how each serving contains about 10% of my daily recommended sodium, this prologue to caramel seemed both sweet and savory, conjuring up mental specters of meaty & milky bowls past.

But just as humanity’s existence is but a hair’s width compared to a forest’s, these initial moments of braised apple are overwhelmed by a brazen caramel sweetness. Whereas in other caramel cereals I’ve reviewed, the caramel flavoring at least tries to be toasty and full-bodied, Caramel Apple Jacks crank the giant Rolo on their sweetness scale up to 11 Kit Kats (a standard unit of measure).

It’s not necessarily a bad taste, but this sort of caramel reminds me of lower quality candies like Sugar Babies or Milk Duds, or even a caramel liqueur. Pair this with equally sugar-coated apple aftertastes and you’ve got a cereal that is, perplexingly, intense in its vagueness. With several kinds of sharp sweetness colliding, Caramel Apple Jacks are ultimately overwhelming to eat dry.

Milk melds these dueling factions of fructose into a more cohesive and grounded interpretation of caramel-covered apples. It’s still very sweet, but now it evokes fonder memories of history book-high mounds of caramel apple suckers that all my fellow junior high students would stockpile for 15¢ a pop from the school store. Yeah, those things.

Overall, it’s hard to give Caramel Apple Jacks a straight-faced score. It’s like I need to invent a new rating system based on the harmonics of apple and caramel wavelengths just to articulate my feelings. It’s a novelty cereal to be tried once, that’s for sure. My befuddlement isn’t to say it tastes great—good enough feels just about right—it’s more like a palatable version of that surprise you got upon first trying Sour Patch Kids Cereal.

Caramel Apple Jacks is of a strange breed. Ostensibly the first of his kind, he is gawky and uneven, like a maiden pancake. But I’ll be damned if he doesn’t have a heart of gold(en brown sugar).

The Bowl: Caramel Apple Jacks

The Breakdown: It’s certainly got apple, and it’s certainly got caramel. But the former is dwarfed by its imposingly saccharine bowlmate, making for a cereal that’s so specifically sweet that it will appeal mostly to battle-hardened sweet teeth and grocery store thrill-seekers (I affectionately call us I mean them the Cult of the Blue Moon)

The Bottom Line: the last 7 remaining Milk Dud fans on Earth out of 10

(Quick Nutrition Facts: 150 calories, 200mg of sodium, 15 grams of sugar, 2 grams of fiber, & 2 grams of protein per 1⅓ cup serving)

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