Kellogg's Special K Red Berries

As a feature publisher for Foodbuzz, I participate in the Foodbuzz Tastemaker program, through which I'm occasionally sent samples of products to review.  Such was the case recently with Kellogg's Special K Red Berries cereal - Kellog's sent along two boxes of the cereal and asked that I try it out and let everyone know what I thought of it.

Maryanne, Lynnafred, and I all enjoy various cold cereals regardless of the time of year, so the Special K was a nice treat.  All of us liked the crunch and the sweet-tartness of the dehydrated strawberries that were sprinkled throughout the mix. Kellogg's is making a big deal of the nice big dose of fiber in every serving, which is hardly surprising since they've been emphasizing the healthy stool-moving qualities of dietary fiber for about a hundred years now, but when we buy a cereal we don't do it based on whether or not it will help us take a big healthy dump.  No, we look at these qualities:

• Is it delicious?
• Will it stay relatively crispy after the milk is poured?
• Will it carry us over for the six-plus hours from breakfast to lunch?

I'm happy to say that  Special K Red Berries succeeds on all three counts.

• It is delicious. The rice and wheat blend is quite tasty.and these grains are helped along by the generous amount of sugar (third on the ingredient list, just behind the rice and wheat) and seemingly-mandatory dollop of high-fructose corn syrup.  Even fans of Cap'n Crunch should need no added sugar to enjoy Red Berries.
• We noticed the Special K Red Berries cereal resisted sogginess somewhat better than the usual cereal flakes.  The red berries, however, delighted in soaking up milk to create soft, flavorful (and quite milky) berries.
• Special K Red Berries did a bang-up job of suppressing The Hungries all morning long.

Good stuff, and worth an addition to the morning lineup as long as you remember that these aren't in the same league as plain corn flakes or Cheerios.  I consider Special K Red Berries to be a "sugar cereal," and enjoy it as an occasional "treat" breakfast.
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New Pop-Tart Varieties

Three new varieties of Pop-Tarts caught my daughter's eye recently. She bought a box of each and we did some tasting. Not all at once, though - the days when I could stand to eat that many Pop-Tarts in one sitting are long gone.

Vanilla Milkshake - I can't figure out what is supposed to be "milkshakey" about this flavor; it's got white frosting with embedded rainbow sprinkles, and it seems to be filled with some kind of vanilla frosting (very creamy in texture, almost drips out when the Pop-Tart is broken open or pulled apart.) Quite delicious vanilla flavor, but nothing obviously "milky" about the taste at all. Perhaps it's because of all the whiteness? Or maybe it's the calcium. Calcium. Why does Kellogg's keep trying to convince everyone that their oversweetened yet delicious piles of empty calories are good for you? It must be a callous marketing ploy. (I know that it can't possibly be anything resembling a "conscience" because large corporations are soulless rat bastards that would happily make baby food out of vivisected puppies and kittens if they could get away with it and were it profitable.) Anyway, thumbs up for the vanilla, they're yummy.

Another strong "thumbs up" goes to the Dulce de Leche, a "Limited Edition" flavor that I have not seen in the mainstream supermarkets around here, but was able to find easily in the nerby city markets catering to Hispanic customers. This has quickly become my daughter's favorite flavor; the rich caramel filling with the little squiggles of brown sugar frosting won her over immediately.

The third and final variety, Guava-Mango, is another "Limited Edition" flavor that we were only able to find at the Hispanic supermarkets. These are tasty, but not quite as successful as the other two - the flavor had no distinct guava or mango notes, but managed to taste more like Hawaiian Punch Fruit Punch than any exotic fruit blend. It tasted a lot like the regular strawberry Pop-Tarts, only less sweet and with a lot less frosting. They were okay, just not something to go out of the way for.

Wild Animal Crunch

I found this cereal in two job lot stores lately. I wonder if it's being discontinued for violation of "truth in advertising" regulations. Because I checked, and there were no wild animals in the ingredients list. I was pretty pissed off, because Baby Seal is one of my favorite flavors. Kellogg's got my mouth all watery and then didn't deliver.

Kellogg's Jump Starts Breakfast

Kids sure do love sugar, don't they? If you gave them Snickers bars and root beer for breakfast every day, you would be T3H COOLEST PARENT EVAR and every one of your kid's friends would cry themselves to sleep at night because you're not their parent, too. The trouble is, the local PTO would be picketing your house and some busybody neighbor would be following you around with a camera and telephoto lens gathering "evidence" against you for your state's Child Protective Services agency.

Lucky for you that Kellogg's came up with these amazing breakfast-in-a-box Jump-Starts things! Jump-Starts are packed with all the sweetness your little sugarfiend could ask for; Kellogg's has given you a socially acceptable way to feed your kids candy for breakfast by carefully disguising it as actual food.

I found a bunch of these at Big Lots! the other day for a dollar a piece (a little better than half off their supermarket price) so my daughter and I decided to try them. Inside, we found a one-ounce container of "reduced sugar" Frosted Flakes, a single Frosted Blueberry Pop-Tart, and a 4.23-ounce juicebox containing apple juice (clearly, this is not a breakfast kit for people following a low-carb diet.) There was also a napkin and spoon. We had to provide our own milk for the cereal - I guess Kellogg's can't be bothered to pack a small no-refrigeration-needed TetraPak of milk in the kit.

Everything in the package was fresh and, I have to admit, delicious. I loved Frosted Flakes when I was a kid and I found nothing wrong with this "reduced sugar" version (couldn't even tell the difference as a matter of fact.) Same goes for the Pop Tarts, even though the Mylar packaging still has that stupid "good source of vitamins and minerals" tag on it. Even the apple juice wasn't that bad. Frosted Flakes and Pop Tarts are every bit as tasty and fun today as they were forty years ago.

I'm really torn about these Jump Starts. On the one hand, I really like Frosted Flakes and Pop Tarts, and I think it's pretty cool that they package these small quantities. My mom would have loved single-wrapped Pop-Tarts - there would have been no second pastry left behind in the box to get soft in the summer humidity while it was waiting for a kid to eat it. And those little cups of Frosted Flakes are the perfect size for a quick snack when it's three hours to supper and you just want a quick munch to take the edge off.

On the other hand, I really don't think it's that great an idea to package up so much sugar into one meal kit designed to be eaten at one sitting. Remember how Pop-Tarts had been marketed as an after-school snack for so many years? Kellogg's is basically bundling up snack items and pushing them as breakfast - and trying to weasel people into thinking it's healthy by cutting out a bit of sugar and labelling the cereal as "reduced sugar."

I'm probably not going to buy these again - I'm not really in the demographic for them anyway - but if I had kids I'd probably pick up a bunch of them and break them down into components for rationing out over the course of a week or so. A kid will still get a kick out of eating cereal from one of those disposable bowls, and I could pair that 1-ounce serving with some toast and peanut butter, saving the Pop-Tart for an after-school snack with a glass of milk. Far better to use them that way than to just let the kid gorge on all that processed sugar and high-fructose corn syrup all at once.

One final note about this "reduced sugar" nonsense (from The Washington Times):

Nutrition scientists who reviewed the lower-sugar versions of six major brands of sweetened cereals at the request of the Associated Press found they have no significant nutritional advantages over their full-sugar counterparts.

The scientists from five universities found that although the new cereals do have less sugar, the calories, carbohydrates, fat, fiber and other nutrients are almost identical to the full-sugar cereals.

"You're supposed to think it's healthy," said Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University and author of a book critical of the food industry's influence on public health. "This is about marketing. It is about nothing else. It is not about kids' health."

Blame the calorie woes on crunch. To preserve cereals' taste and texture, sugar is replaced with other carbohydrates that have the same calories as sugar and are no better nutritionally.

Links:
Kellogg's website
Ingredients and Nutritional Information for Frosted Flakes Jump-Starts

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Healthy Snacks

I was browsing the selection in the vending machine at work when this tag on one of the snacks caught my eye:

Pretty impressive. This stuff isn't just any old source of a couple vitamins or minerals, but a good source. Of seven - count 'em - seven vitamins and minerals. Check it out:

Healthy stuff indeed, with all those B-vitamins and whatnot. Pity they couldn't have snuck some Vitamin C and calcium in there to round things out, eh?

So, what is this miracle food you ask?

Kellog's Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop Tarts.

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Pop Tarts Splitz

I was born in 1960, and I can not remember a time without Pop-Tarts. When I was a kid, my mom always seemed to have a box on hand in the cupboard. They were an occasional treat, usually served up with a glass of milk for an after-school snack; Mom used to buy the ones filled with strawberry or blueberry jam though I'm pretty sure that more kinds of fruit-preserve filling were available.

When I was in high school, I discovered that Kelloggs was making a "Brown Sugar/Cinnamon" flavor, and it soon became my favorite. There was a layer of moist, cinnamon-adulterated brown sugar filling sandwiched between two layers of short pastry crust, topped with a hard shell of brown-colored confectioner's glaze. They were delicious, and completely devoid of any kind of nutritional value whatsoever - Brown Sugar/Cinnamon Pop-Tarts defined the phrase "empty calories" even better than alcohol.

I have the feeling that over the years, the hypersweet junkfood Pop-Tarts have been better sellers than the [not really] healthy fruit-filled ones. I never seem to see new fruity varieties get introduced, but I've noticed plenty of the "empty calorie" variety ones come and go. Like, for example, this one: Pop-Tarts Splitz, with chocolate filling and frosting on one side, and vanilla frosting and filling on the inside.

Now, if you don't like Pop-Tarts to begin with, nothing I write here is going to change your mind about them. The basic flavors in Pop-Tarts haven't changed all that much since I was a kid, and with the exception of the fillings, there isn't anything different about these. The pastry crust is still pretty industrial, kind of flaky/crumbly, with a quite pleasant shortbread note to it. The frosting is still that hardened confectioner's-glaze style stuff that reminds me of hardened royal icing.

There aren't any real surprises inside, either. The chocolate side tastes like sweetened cocoa and the vanilla side like artificially-flavored vanilla cake frosting. There's no fruit, no "healthy bits," nothing at all here to redeem them to parents concerned about their childrens' intake of lowest-common-denominator crap. They're just like the Brown-Sugar/Cinnamon Pop-Tarts of my youth, updated with fresh new carbohydrate overload, and with a frosting pattern on top that resembles tire tracks on a snowy road. Pretty awesome all the way around, I think.

Pop-Tarts has their own website at www.poptarts.com. Be advised if you go there, it's kind of clunky and top-heavy with animations and stuff, and they also tell you that you can't access some of the content without shutting off your pop-up blocker. Pretty funny, huh?