Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Cereal, Reviewed

My name is Jamelle Bouie, and this is another Serious Eats Cereal Review. I'm back, this time with a brand new cereal as always and I'm actually very excited to try this cereal. This is Kellogg's Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Cereal. [It] comes straight from I guess our friends down in Mexico. The most noteworthy thing about this box is this label in the top right that says in Spanish "excessive calories, excessive sugar." Some nutrition facts: 38 grams of sugar per serving, which is outrageous. Why not just eat a donut, you know? Having said that, let's get started.

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Cereal, excessive calories, excessive sugar. A hazard to your health, and I'm going to put it into my mouth. Oh, I've got to smell it first. That's weird. Maybe it's the box, but there's almost sort of like a very vaguely yeasty smell like a donut, so that's interesting. So if you can see them here, I can't really Zoom in to the camera here, but if you can see them, it's like a Cheerio—an Oreo O actually is the shape it reminds me most of. So no yeasty taste, which thank God, that'd be awful. Very sugary, very sugary. I think in a past episode I reviewed some of the Eggo waffles cereal or some sort of big good theme cereal:

Sugar cookie-flavored cereal seems to mean a cereal that is both very sugary, but then also has some sort of note of artificial butter.

There's that artificial butter flavor they like to throw in there, and this has a little bit of that.; not too much of it, just the hint. I find that artificial butter flavored to be incredibly off-putting, but it's not the worst thing I've ever had.

Let's pour it in the bowl. Got my spoon, let's give this a shot. So one thing I've noticed in doing these—how many of these I've done—is that the character of the cereal does change between trying it dry and trying it in a bowl. And that's just because you're getting more cereal with each bite, and that does actually change the character of the experience. You get more, you know, and get more of it. When I was just eating one or two of these at a time, I thought they were fine, but now that I'm eating five, six, seven of them at a time, I'm not a big fan of this. It's very sugary, again, which is not pleasant. And in addition to being very sugary, the artificial butter flavor in everything kind of really comes through a bit more, so it's not disgusting. You've seen how I react when I have something disgusting.

[COUGHS]

I would not want to finish this bowl.

Let's do the soak test. I got to find a better name for that. It's been sitting there for about five minutes, so let's go for it. I'm just going to do one spoonful. You know, I like that everyone likes these and I'm glad that this story drives some entertainment from this, but I will only go so far and as far as I'll go is one bite of soggy cereal. So it holds up pretty well to the milk. It's kind of chewy, weirdly. Of course, no cereal or very few cereals are good after being in milk for this long, so I'm not going to say this is great. But comparatively, this does hold up pretty well in the milk.

Last test: I'm going to try the milk to see if any of that sugary buttery flavor has seeped in. And it has, and I don't like it. It's like drinking sugar milk.

So I've done our five tests, we've gone through them, and now it's time to come to a verdict. What do I think of Kellogg's Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Cereal? It's a little worse than fine, which I guess would be about 2 and 1/2 spoons. It's not horrendous, but I don't think you're going to derive very much pleasure or satisfaction from eating this. I don't think it's going to spark joy. If you want to eat something that tastes like a Krispy Kreme doughnut, just get a Krispy Kreme doughnut. I haven't had one in a while, but as I remember, they're pretty good.

That has been a Serious Eats Cereal Review. I am Jamelle Bouie, and we'll see you next time.