How Many Of These Do You Remember?
Cereal has been an American breakfast staple since the turn of the 20th century. What started as a convenient, grain-based, easy-to-digest alternative to heavier traditional options quickly spun out of control. The 1970s and 80s saw the introduction of completely unhinged cereal options, some of which were based on popular TV show characters, while others were just sugar bombs. Even in the 90s and early aughts, and up to the present day, we continue to see ridiculous cereal creations grace our grocery store shelves, largely strange hybrid creations between popular candies or desserts and breakfast cereals. Here are 20 of the strangest ever sold.
1. Sir Grapefellow
Grape is arguably everyone's least favorite flavor. However, it took some time for cereal brands to understand that as there were once multiple grape-flavored cereals on the market. This one was named after a fictional knighted pilot.
2. Sour Patch Kids Cereal
Did you know the beloved sour-then-sweet gummy candy once became a breakfast cereal? We use the term "breakfast" lightly, as it's more of an unappetizing dessert. The product was discontinued shortly after it was introduced.
Kevin Ho from Canada on Wikimedia
3. Nickelodeon Green Slime Cereal
Have you ever watched Nickelodeon and thought, "That green slime looks yummy?" Apparently, that's what Nickelodeon thought when it introduced this cereal. It tastes like tart green apple and changes color right before your eyes, which is cool but also sounds like it might be toxic.
4. Wendy's Frosty Chocolatey Cereal
The moment they turned an ice cream dessert into a cereal is the moment when cereal stopped even trying to pretend to be "part of a complete breakfast." Wendy's partnered with Kellogg's in 2022 to make this limited-edition cereal made up of cocoa cereal bites and chocolate-flavored marshmallow pieces.
5. Chicken & Waffles Cereal
Despite the title, this cereal didn't really have chunks of chicken in it (thank goodness). Instead, it had chicken-flavored cereal pieces shaped like drumsticks amongst maple waffle cereal pieces. People who tried it say it tasted like someone dumped ramen seasoning into a bowl of maple-flavored cereal.
6. Banana Frosted Flakes
If you've ever had a bowl of Frosted Flakes and thought, "This is missing some artificial banana flavor," this may just be the cereal for you. For the rest of us, however, it's a perfectly good way to ruin a bowl of delightful Frosted Flakes.
7. Crunchy Loggs
Bixby Beaver was the mascot for this sweet corn and oat cereal from the 1970s. The beaver was kind of cute, but that's where the appeal for these little log-shaped morsels ended.
SomeBodyAnyBody05 on Wikimedia
8. Mr. T Cereal
What screams 1980s more than a breakfast cereal related to this popular The A-Team character? We'll wait. The T-shaped sweetened corn and oats cereal was a popular fixture on cereal shelves of the decade, and it even made an appearance on Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, with Pee-wee Herman pouring himself a bowl and using the catch phrase, “I pity the poor fool that don’t eat my cereal.”
Fotopersbureau De Boer on Wikimedia
9. Kisses Cereal
There are few times most of us eat Hershey's chocolate kisses outside of Halloween and Christmas. Despite this, Hershey's thought they would make a great cereal. If you can get past the terribly unappetizing appearance of the little brown mounds, it's richly chocolatey and delicious.
10. Cap’n Crunch’s Cotton Candy Crunch
We want to know who could possibly have been eating a bowl of Cap'n Crunch and thought, "This just isn't sweet enough." That's the type of sick person who came up with Cotton Candy Crunch. It's all the sugary-ness of Cap'n Crunch plus cotton candy flavor, which is essentially just more sugar.
11. Mud and Bugs Cereal
A Lion King-themed cereal could've taken any possible direction. However, instead of making something cool, Kellogg's decided to take the disgusting grubs Timon and Pumbaa ate, physically revolting Simba, and make it into a chocolate cereal that kids are expected to want to eat.
12. Graham Crackos
We can't believe no one on the marketing team at Kellogg's saw the problem with calling a cereal Crackos. The concept is simply an o-shaped graham cracker cereal, which sounds nice, but the name is enough to turn parents off from buying it.
13. Dunkin' Mocha Latte Cereal
Who doesn't love Dunkin' Donuts' mocha latte? As weird as it is to put the coffee beverage into a cereal, it actually works. The chocolatey, crispy balls have a strong coffee flavor, and the marshmallows are like sweet cream. Don't expect any nutritional value, but if you want a sweet breakfast treat, this certainly fits the bill.
14. Urkel-O’s
If Mr. T cereal was the most 80s thing ever, Urkel-O's may just be the most 90s thing ever. Steve Urkel from Family Matters was such a popular character that he got his own cereal.
15. Mr. Wonderfull’s Surprize
Mr. Wonderfull's Surprize was a cereal from the 1970s that promised to have a crispy corn puff exterior and a chewy chocolate-vanilla center. However, the chewy center tended to ooze out of its exterior and settle in a sticky mass on the bottom of the box. Nutritionists and dentists tried (and failed) to stop the cereal's release due to its staggering sugar content, but because it wasn't a very good product, it was discontinued three years later, anyway.
16. Corn Flakes With Instant Bananas
Kellogg's came up with this cereal in 1964, when instant food was at the height of its popularity. It came out shortly after other brands started adding freeze-dried strawberries to their cereals, but it didn't work quite as well with bananas as they would turn brown in the milk. You'd be better off buying the fruit and slicing it into your cereal.
17. Ice Cream Cones Cereal
This cereal from the late '80s consisted of mini waffle cones with chocolate or vanilla ice cream rounds. It was discontinued less than a year after it hit the market, probably due to parents' greater awareness around healthy eating and sugar content.
18. Dinersaurs
While the idea of a dinosaur-themed breakfast cereal sounds promising, the direction they took with this is nothing short of perplexing. It was themed around a diner run by dinosaurs, the restaurant itself also seemingly operating inside the body of a dinosaur.
19. C-3PO's
C-3PO's was a crunchy honey-oat wheat and corn cereal based on one of the less popular Star Wars characters. A cereal based on this beloved franchise could've been so cool, but instead, we got weird-shaped Honeycombs cereal.
20. Sugar Corn-Fetti
To its credit, Post's Sugar Corn-Fetti was exactly as advertised: extremely sweet sugar-coated corn flakes. Post clearly didn't get the memo that sugar was an undesired ingredient to feed children with.
