Tag Archives: quaker

Gimme Five…New Episodes of Cereal Time with Gabe Fonseca!

Oreo cookies! Skeletons! Mikey! Cartoon slime! The hippest sea captain you’ve ever seen!

Hopefully that grabbed your attention. It’s been a while since we last checked in with our friend Gabe Fonseca’s Cereal Time YouTube series—which spotlights a different cereal each week in a fun and nostalgic way. Decades from now, Breakfast History 101 professors will screen Gabe’s episodes as insightful windows into the cereal culture of days gone by.

Even in the twinkling, chrome future, the teachers will probably still show them on those ancient rolling TV carts, too.

To bring you up to speed on Gabe’s Cereal Time efforts, we’re going to have a viewing party for his five latest episodes. So let’s all build a blanket fort, pop some popcorn, and get cozy, because we’ve got years of memories to relive.

You did remember to bring the powdered nacho cheese topping for the popcorn, right? Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Specials. Tags: cap'n crunch, cereal time, halloween, kelloggs, monster cereals, quaker. Leave a comment

Oct. ’16

News: Cap’n Crunch Teams Up with KITH Treats for a Unique Cereal-Fashion Collaboration

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hQ_aGtCbAI

Who says a white-haired, curly mustachioed sea captain can’t roll with the cool kids?

With the help of NYC fashion company KITH, Cap’n Crunch is ditching his barnacle-encrusted nautical garb for some truly 21st century threads. I guess he finally realized that epaulets are so last millennium. The partnership between the Cap’n and KITH comes as an extension of the latter’s KITH Treats cereal bar—the first of its kind in the city, predating even Kellogg’s recent foray into the cereal café game.

The ever-trendy KITH Treats has partnered with nostalgia icons like Power Rangers and Rugrats in the past, and since I’ve written before that Cap’n Crunch is nostalgia embodied, it makes sense that KITH designer Ronnie Fieg would make the Cap’n his next V.I.P.

Any party that has Rita Repulsa, Tommy Pickles, and Cap’n Crunch on the guest list is worth sneaking past the bouncer for. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: News. Tags: cap'n crunch, quaker. 1 Comment

Sep. ’16

Review: Quaker Breakfast Flats Golden Raisin Cinnamon Breakfast Bars

“Gimme a fat stack of phat Breakfast Flats, STAT!”

Now that Quaker’s new-for-2016 Breakfast Flats—which come in Cranberry Almond, Banana Honey Nut, and Golden Raisin Cinnamon—are on shelves, you probably hear that phrase around all the time.

Or more likely, you’ve probably never heard it, since I just made it up. Plus, no one has used the word “phat” since the Taft administration. He was the raddest, coolest president, after all.

All William Howards aside, a fat stack of 3 plastic-wrapped Golden Raisin Cinnamon breakfast bars sits in front of me. Full disclosure: the main reason I’m reviewing these is because my loving grandmother gave them to me as a thoughtful gift, knowing how much I love Raisin Bran.

So this one’s for you, Grandma. Time to make you proud by photographing sticky glazed raisin rectangles. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 7 rating, breakfast bars, cinnamon, non cereal, quaker, raisin. Leave a comment

Sep. ’16

Review: Quaker Banana Bonanza Oatmeal and Blueberry Bash Oatmeal

Quick: pretend you’re in 4th grade and it’s lunch time. You sit down at an uncomfortable wooden table, and tear open your hyper-crinkly brown bag while you wait for your friends to come back from the hot lunch line with their spicy chicken sandwiches and Bosco breadsticks.

You’re more than a little jealous of them, but you know Mom had to have packed you something good. So what’s the main course? Ham and cheese on rye? Leftover chow mein from China Kingdom down the road?

Both guesses are wrong. In an attempt to get you eating healthy, Mom packed Quaker’s newest instant oatmeal cup flavors: Banana Bonanza and Blueberry Bash.

But are these oatmeal cones worth trudging over to the school’s vintage, pizza sauce-stained microwave for? Or should you trade them like edible Pokémon cards and try to game Billy out of his Ziploc full of Oreos?

Those are the existential questions I hope to answer.

Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 6 rating, 7 rating, banana, blueberry, non cereal, oatmeal, quaker. Leave a comment

Aug. ’16

Meet the Illustrator Behind Cap’n Crunch!

Yep, you read that title right. Recently, Cap’n Crunch’s box art game has been very on point—and I’m not just talking about the boxes that involve Cap’n Crunch playing actual sports games.

From HomeRun Crunch and Touchdown Crunch to Orange Creampop Crunch and super close-up revamps of classic boxes, the white-haired Cap’n has been looking more spry and animated in 2016 than ever before.

Better yet, the backs of these boxes feature more than just the ever-lively cereal ship captain we know and love. Alongside games, puzzles, a bustling zoo of caricatured animals, and at least one Statue of Liberty, recent Cap’n Crunch boxes have featured countless revivals of vintage Quaker mascots.

From Crunch mainstays like Jean LaFoote to obscure, decades-old villains like Magnolia Bulkhead, these 2016 boxes have something for cereal lovers from the ’60s, ’80s, and every where (or should I say every when) in-between.

As a serious cereal fan myself, I wasn’t content with just looking at these awesome new boxes. I wanted to find out what was behind this recent Crunchatized revitalization, especially after boxes of Peanut Butter Crunch have featured that same Olympics scene since the 2008 Beijing Games.

Before long, I found out who was behind this shift, too. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Specials. Tags: cap'n crunch, quaker. 8 Comments

Aug. ’16

Review: Limited Edition Cap’n Crunch’s Touchdown Crunch Cereal

All brands celebrate football season differently. M&M’s slaps eye grease and jerseys on their famous spokescandies. Pepsi erects giant cyborg quarterbacks made out of cardboard and 12-packs for grocery store displays. But Cap’n Crunch? He releases an entire football themed cereal!

It’s called Cap’n Crunch’s Touchdown Crunch cereal, and it was first introduced in 2009. However, there’s one key difference between today’s Touchdown Crunch and the one from 7 years ago. If you cross-compare the boxes, you’ll see that Cap’n Crunch got buff!

Since the Cap’n is a 53-year old cereal mascot, I can’t see why he suddenly reformed his fitness plan. Maybe it was to silence all those high school bullies who made fun of his gravity-defying eyebrows.

Or maybe it was just to impress attractive mermaids. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 8 rating, cap'n crunch, quaker. 5 Comments

Aug. ’16

Four More from “Cereal Time with Gabe Fonseca!”

Need something to Brite-n your day? Okay, do you need four things to brighten your day after that terrible pun?

Well you’re in luck, because there are four new episodes in cereal archivist Gabe Fonseca’s Cereal Time YouTube series. Longtime Cereal Time binge watchers know the drill, but I’ll catch everyone else up to speed on this series in one sentence:

One man spotlights one cereal every one week to produce three-to-four fun-filled minutes of breakfast nostalgia.

Intrigued? Let’s start somewhere over the rainbow with Gabe’s episode on Rainbow Brite Cereal. As he states in the video, this 1985 cereal was a tie-in with Rainbow Brite’s animated feature film, and it features a literal rainbow of fruity and crunchy…shapes?

The more logical would see them as Rainbow Brite’s hair curls or shirt sleeves, but I prefer to call them “Macaroni & cheese mixed with the colorful grubs Timon and Pumbaa eat in The Lion King.” Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Specials. Tags: cap'n crunch, cereal time, cheerios, general mills, life, pumpkin, quaker, ralston. Leave a comment

Aug. ’16

Review: Quaker Limited Edition Pumpkin Spice Life Cereal

I know this cereal is called Pumpkin Spice Life, but in my mind, there’s an invisible equals sign in-between the last two words.

Pumpkin Spice = Life.

It’s the kind of thing a true autumn addict would get tattooed above their knuckles after getting sent to jail for building jack-o-lantern totem poles above the legal height limit. If that sounds like the plot of a gritty Goosebumps reboot, then I’ve succeeded.

But for these next 3-4 months, pumpkin spice really will be life for grocery store browsers and BuzzFeed editors everywhere. And the latest cereal staple to jump on this cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, cloves, Donner, and Blitzen bandwagon is Life. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 7 rating, life, pumpkin, quaker. 9 Comments