What happens when cereal grows up?

The Trix Rabbit starts moonlighting, doing Easter photoshoots at Michaels.
Sonny directs an autobiopic, starring Jack Nicholson, about his frequent, Cocoa Puff-inspired escapes from various insane asylums.
And Cap’n Crunch, of course, continues his storied 3000-year legacy as an immortal cereal centurion, subsisting solely on the blood of rejected unicorns harvested from the dumpster behind a Kellogg’s factory.

Yes, aging doesn’t pair with cereal quite as well as milk—my stomach is no longer lined with Nintendium, and The Weather Channel’s Saturday morning lineup isn’t quite as compelling. But Magic Spoon Cereal is out to change that: with flashy packaging and four flavors inspired by classic sweet stuff, this new cereal startup prides itself on having more protein and fewer carbs than mainstream cereals, with keto friendliness and no grains or gluten.

Now all who have seen what I’m capable of on this blog know that my only dietary restriction is my imagination (and, uh, lactose), so it wasn’t the healthy promises that drew me to these cereals. It was the eye-popping box colors that pretty accurately reflect my day-to-day wardrobe’s palette, plus the fact that people are apparently getting served ads for this stuff after visiting my site.

I’m honored to be a worthy track-factor for global cereal lovers, and I’m thankful to the folks behind Magic Spoon Cereal for sending me a full variety pack for review. So stuff your face with buckwheat and calzones while you can, because where we’re going, we won’t need grains.

Frosted Magic Spoon Cereal Review

What better way to start the magic than with a hallucinogenically pasteled wizard—and the most traditionally flavored Magic Spoon Cereal of the bunch.

Though the name may make you think Frosted Flakes, from my first look at these ivory rings, I took this as a direct homage to Powdered Donettes Cereal. This is a bold approach for Magic Spoon, as Powdered Donettes, with its avalanched layers of perma-frosted-on sweetness, is still my favorite cereal of 2019 so far. Nevertheless, the smell of Frosted MSC is promisingly confected.

And the taste? Let’s just say that after growing card-bored of bland healthy cereals, this is an undeniable step up from the geriatric blandness of bran flakes and bean-based whatchamacall’ems. Using an unconventional sweetener blend of stevia, monkfruit, and allulose, Magic Spoon Cereal is still uniquely yummy enough to be mouthwatering—even if that not-so-sugariness is punctuated by the subtle planty accents of stevia.

For Frosted, the most appealing overtones smack of vanilla pudding—a testament to its and tapioca flour ingredient, probably—and grocery-store brand Oreo filling. So not quite Donettian levels of decadence, but still satisfying.

Unfortunately, the back nine chews of each spoonful show Magic Spoon’s biggest weakness: a chalky aftertaste that makes milk mandatory. And while creamy reinforcements do temper this drywalled trait, I’d recommend additional masking with granola or fruit.

The Bottom Line: 6.5 as a normal cereal, 8.5 as a healthy cereal, so ~7.5, depending on your nutritional intents (out of 10)

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Cocoa Magic Spoon Cereal

Let’s address the 800-gram gorilla in the kitchen: chocolate, the ever-trusty safety pick for cereal lovers seeking reliable indulgence. Magic Spoon’s take on chocolate is to Frosted what the humble Chocodile is to the Twinkie. Evidenced by the pale white underbelly inside each ring, these taste like co-coated cousins of crunchy tapioca pudding.

The chocolate flavor here is decently fudgy, not unlike the oily veneer you’d find on a Nutty Buddy or chocolate coin. But like any edible doubloon, there is a flipside. In Cocoa Magic Spoon, more so than in any other flavor, the taste of protein powder is unmistakable. My taste buds primed by all the chocolate whey bars I ate during my college sports years (couldn’t let my competitive Smash Bros. muscle memory atrophy), this cereal immediately reminded me of a PowerBar: grainy, powdered milky, at times slightly waxy, and in my case, bizarrely nostalgic.

Nintendo and palm kernel oil will now be inexorably intertwined in my subconscious.

Thankfully, milk (which I am henceforth requiring for all Magic Spoon cereals) again soothes most troublesome subtleties, making Cocoa Magic Spoon a satisfactory glow-up from Frosted—even though milk dilutes the fudge factor a lot, and the endmilk turns only a pale chestnut hue, rather than the rich russet soup beneath a Cocoa Pebbles bowl.

The Bottom Line: 8 (on the normal–healthy hybrid continuum) out of 10

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Fruity Magic Spoon Cereal

Fruity cereals and I don’t always play well together. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good bushel of Trix or basket-full of Crunch Berries, but I’ve been jaded by so many not-so-super cereals that spray on an (often acrid) fake fruitiness like a grocery store vegetable mister. It seems using real fruit ingredients is probably cost-prohibitive when you’re already shelling out big mamma-mia money to use Mario’s likeness, so these shortcuts usually lead to half-full, fully stale boxes of uneaten fruitish swill left to stagnate atop my fridge.

And unfortunately, Fruity Magic Spoon Cereal stumbles over that same pitfall, despite its natural flavoring. The first bite of any spoonful fruit-punches you hard with a perfume-y pop of bubblegum-buttered mixed berry—before ditching all real flavor for that gummy protein aftertaste faster than a Yoshi casually dismounted into oblivion.

Yes, milk helps find a happier, lightly cotton-candied middleground between medicinal and munch-able, but this is ultimately the weakest Magic Spoon flavor by a sizable margin. Even fruity cereal diehards will have trouble savoring any deeply buried and shallowly berried appeal before it’s erased off the aftertaste’s protein-powdered chalkboard.

The Bottom Line: 5 boxes of Cap’n La Croix out of 10

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Cinnamon Magic Spoon Cereal

If Fruity was the low point of this sorcerous quadrilogy, then Cinnamon Magic Spoon Cereal is the sizzling redemption arc—it only took one bite to peg this as the tastiest flavor of the bunch. Thanks to the pervasive staying power of cinnamon, this stuff’s taste does what the other varieties’ can’t: overstay its welcome and keep each ring warm and cozy for the duration of its mouthfeeling (mouthfeeled? mouthfelt?) experience.

But my earlier caution still stands: Cinnamon Toast Crunch, this is not. Rather, its closest crunchy clone would be Cinnamon Puffins, a similarly spicy-sweet, healthy cinnamon cereal that also sweetens the pot with mouthwatering molasses undertones. Yes, Cinnamon Magic Spoon Cereal straddles a comforting middle line between cinnamon roll and gingerbread, which makes it perfect snack for Christmas in July.

This flavor also does the best job of endmilk infusion, leaving behind a sort of oaky afterbirth that’s not quite snickerdoodled, but definitely snickerscribbled, at least. So while no Magic Spoon variety can quite transcend the natural nuances of its 12 grams of protein per serving, Cinnamon is the one to try if you need to bench press your balanced breakfast.

The Bottom Line: 8.5 magically nutritious compromises out of 10

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Adjusting for inflation, Magic Spoon Cereals are definitely upper echelon products within the good-for-you cereal pantheon. Are they perfect doppelgängers for Donettes, Cocoa Puffs, or other sugary cereals? No, but if the likes of Fiber One leave you lumbering, this may be the lowest-sugar way to sugarcoat adulthood’s harsh realities. However, the one drawback to Magic Spoon that I can’t overlook is the price: at nearly $10 a box, you’ll be shredding muscles while shedding your wallet’s weight. But if you have the breakfast budget of an avocado toast addict, these cereals’ unique taste might still be worth a few bicep curls…

…aka, lifting spoon to mouth.