Review: Honey Nut Cheerios Granola Snack

Honey Nut Cheerios Granola Snack Cereal Pouch

Have you ever been eating Honey Nut Cheerios in one hand and Pop Rocks in the other and thought, “Gee, I really wish someone would combine the best of these two completely different foods. That way I could have a free hand for high-fiving strangers, wrangling rattlesnakes, and writing obtusely obscure hypotheticals into online cereal reviews?”

Well think no more and start mindlessly munching, because General Mills’s new Honey Nut Cheerios Granola Snack is about to make your obtuse problem feel a lot more right.

And yes: that was a geometry joke.

Honey Nut Cheerios Granola Snack Oats

Released alongside Cinnamon Toast Crunch Granola Snack, Honey Nut Cheerios Granola Snack is a rather simple treat that uses sweet honey stickiness to glue Honey Nut Cheerios rings and toasted oats together into crispy, crunchy clusters. Though saying clusters might be giving this Granola Snack too much credit, because my bag had more loose oats than the Quaker Oat guy’s vacuum bag.

But like every elementary school elbow macaroni picture frame that ever spewed gluey noodles across the family coffee table, these loose oats and O’s are more charming than irritating.

And they’re quite tasty, too. Like Pop Rocks, every oat bit, cluster, or occasional boulder in Honey Nut Cheerios Granola Snack crackles happily in your mouth. This crackle is so fun that Buzz the Bee will probably be getting a marshmallowy warning brick through his window sometime soon, courtesy of three nameless elves who want him out of their territory.

The actual honey flavor is familiar, too—but not from Honey Nut Cheerios itself, or even Honey Nut Cheerios Medley Crunch, which previously paired America’s favorite cereal with granola. No, while plain Honey Nut Cheerios smacks primarily of floral honey with a syrupy finish of buttered almond, Honey Nut Cheerios Granola Snack leads with a robust and fully roasted nuttiness, before fading into an aftertaste of dark, molasses-smoked honey. It reminded me of Kashi GoLean Crunch or an exploded bowl of Honey Graham Ohs if they were pan seared in vegetable oil.

In short, if O.G. Honey Nut Cheerios are Martha Stewart, this Honey Nut Cheerios Granola Snack is a rowdy Guy Fieri with a trace of sassy Gordan Ramsay.

Honey Nut Cheerios Granola Snack with Milk

In milk (which General Mills probably never intended their Granola Snack to be paired with—but hey, overprotective parents lead to rebellious oats), Honey Nut Cheerios Granola Snack better balances its dark sugariness with milk’s lighter sweetness.Milk’s creaminess and the toasty granola crisps’ browned butteriness pair to make the whole thing taste, again, a bit like a hearty Cheerios Krispies Treat.

Guess I should be expecting a brick through my window any minute now.

I didn’t expect to like Honey Nut Cheerios Granola Snack better than the Cinnamon Toast Crunch kind, but this stuff does better at evolving its namesake flavor and making a more memorable final product. Its honey-smoked flavor might not be that unique—I won’t be writing “Mr. Honey Nut Cheerios Granola Snack” again and again on the inside of my Trapper Keeper with hearts over the i’s—but this Granola Snack will be sure to delight the world’s many Honey Nut Cheerios diehards who want to remix their favorite flavor on the go.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go stop those vengeful gnomes from putting marshmallows in my gas tank.


The Bowl: Honey Nut Cheerios Granola Snack

The Break Down: Nutty but not worth going nuts over, Honey Nut Cheerios Granola brings a pleasantly crispy—though perhaps a bit overdone—dark flavor to an innocently saccharine classic. Additional, manually administered honey drizzles are optional, but highly recommended

The Bottom Line: 7.5 Rice Krispies cartels out of 10

(Quick Nutrition Facts: 120 calories, 2 grams of fiber, 8 grams of sugar, and 3 grams of protein per 1/3 cup serving)

6 responses »

  1. I just listened to the podcast mentioning how you cannot find anyone else who has found/reviewed these. Ok so I personally don’t have any “evidence” to show you that I have once found these, yet I do want to say I did see these in the aisle at my local Albertson’s a few years back. Yes I wish I had a photo of evidence to prove to you about this, but at least maybe you can trust my word that I did at one point spot these.

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