Know your Kix from your Applejacks just by looking at 'em? Prove it with our cereal ID quiz.


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Wheaties may be the breakfast of Champions, but are you the champion of breakfast cereals? See if you can identify Cocoa Pebbles from Cocoa Krispies and Cap'n Crunch from Kix. Crunch your way through this quiz, and then come back here to share your score and dish on your favorite cereals!

Breakfast Cereal ID Quiz

OK, confession time: I don't drink the milk in my cereal bowl.

Well, I eat my cereal with milk poured over it, of course. I'm just not one of these people who slurps up the leftover milk once my cereal is gone. I've never understood why people do this. I usually pour just enough milk to eat my cereal so there's no milk remaining when I'm done with my Cheerio's or Quisp or Corn Pops. If there is milk leftover I actually put a little more cereal in the bowl or just throw the milk away.

So that's why I'll never buy the new cereal straws from Kellogg's. It sounds like a fun idea, but it's nothing I'd ever use.

Has anyone else tried them?

There are two things I have been trying like the Dickens to change about my diet: 1) drinking more water, and 2) eating food with more fiber. The water part is hard for me because I don't like how plain water tastes (yes, water does have a taste, you know), and I have an unholy addiction to Diet Coke and energy drinks.

The fiber part is even harder. I love fresh fruits and vegetables, but that's not the issue. The issue is my lifestyle. I don't just have a full-time job. I have the fullest-time job possible, I blog, and I live alone. This combination makes it near impossible to cook proper meals that include fresh produce and grains with fiber. For a while, I was taking fiber supplements in the form of, you know, those "drink" things, but that stopped as soon as I realized how bloated I was getting from it.

FiberOne is a candidate in my quest for quick sources of fiber. FiberOne is a line from cereal and food company General Mills that has a few products, all focusing on high fiber. The basic cereal looks like any other fiber cereal - little "noodles" or "branches" - that definitely look too healthy to enjoy. General Mills has expanded the line with two more family friendly cereals, meaning that in the bowl, they look a lot less clinical.

I tried FiberOne Raisn Bran Clusters, which is FiberOne's entrant in the raisin bran cereal playing field, which is dominated by Kellog's Raisin Bran. However, if the marketing on the cereal box is accurate, FiberOne beats all other raisin brans with 40% of the recommended daily intake of fiber. Supposedly, that makes FiberOne's Raisin Bran Clusters the leader.

Sometimes we forget that all the products in a supermarket are actually invented by someone. They all don't just "come about" in some way. Take cereal. There are many brands and styles, but a lot of the cereal is actually the same. The difference might be in the shape of the cereal or the mascot on the box or something you add to the cereal.

But Cap 'n Crunch has a distinct taste, and the inventor of that taste, Pamela Low, passed away last week.

It's been a long time since I've eaten a bowl of cold cereal, which is surprising, since my lifestyle right now is even more turbo-charged than it was when I was eating a bowl of Special K standing over my kitchen sink at 11 PM every night for "dinner."

However, it was a nice surprise to be offered the opportunity to try a new extension of the Cheerios line of cereals: Fruity Cheerios! Not only had it been a while since I've had cereal, but it's been a while since I'd eaten something so...colorful.

If you've got kids, or are remotely familiar with popular culture and design, then you probably know KidRobot, a line of "designer" toys. Now part of the KidRobot collection are 2" tall figures of our favorite monster cereals, Franken Berry, Count Chocula, and Boo Berry. The toys are sold as part of a "random assortment," which I don't totally understand, but according to KidRobot, it "means that each item ordered will be picked out of the series at random." So you may not want to start your day off with a sugar rush from the cereal, but you can certainly say Good Morning to their spokesmonsters!

I don't eat much cold cereal anymore these days. There was, however, a period of my life when cereal was my only form of sustenance. I ate a sugar-spiked cereal for breakfast to help jump-start my day, never ate lunch, then came home close to midnight after work every night (was I insane, or was I consultant on the partner track?) and wolfed down a bowl of Special K while standing over my sink before collapsing into bed. Cereal is fast and (relatively) cheap.

So, I understand why a person (or persons) would dedicate an entire blog to the stuff. Cereal Blogger is food blog authored by some peeps from New Jersey who do nothing but muse about cereal and all things cereal-related.

If you're a cereal addict, Cereal Blogger might be worth a peek. Don't worry, I don't think the bloggers' names are Snap, Crackle, and Pop.

Kellogg's is planning to raise prices and decrease package sizes for its ready-to-eat boxed cereals this fall. The cereal giant is expected to increase its marketing budget, or at least maintain it, to make sure that customers keep buying their products in spite of pricing changes. After all, they have to convince the consumer that it is worth paying more money for less cereal for their profits to remain the same.

But is it worth it? The two main reasons that people eat cold cereal are convenience and price. A bowl of cereal takes seconds to prepare and you can get several meals out of one box. But, if given all the time and luxury of a relaxing Sunday, cereal might not be the first thing that breakfasters would reach for. A small price hike, about 2%, might not make a big difference in buying habits, but it will certainly set the stage for other cereal companies to follow in the footsteps of the largest cereal company and could even lead to further changes in pricing. When consumers realize that they are getting less than what they think they're paying for, some might stop buying cereal on a regular basis and the companies could be hurt more in the long run.

We here at Slashfood have known for sometime that there was another player in the cereal restaurant game besides Cereality. The Surreal Bowl, which opened in Florida this past May, hinges its concept on allowing customers to combine sugary cereals.

Chicago-based Cereality thus far has had no problem with The Surreal Bowl. Not so for Cerealicious. The grandaddy of the breakfast restaurant sued the Canada Ohio-based copycat for trademark infringement and unfair competitive activities in franchising its business. I'm guessing the suit was prompted by Cerealicious' plans to open in the Ohio market.

Cereality just settled its federal lawsuit this week, hailing it as a victory for trademark protection. Guess this means I'll have to call my investors and tell them that Cereal Killers is a no-go.

It's fun to check out Topher's Cereal Character Guide, which lists just about every cartoon cereal character you can imagine (and some you can't), but another fun part of the cereal box is the back. The back of the boxes have games, puzzles, promotions and other information. They change frequently, but there is a site that has a cereal box archive, with photos of both the fronts and the backs of hundreds of cereal boxes. Many of the boxes advertise free or discounted products that tie in to the cereal itself. Merchandise includes dartboards, gum and even door knockers - all of which can make us remember why we got up to eat cereal and watch cartoons on weekend mornings: free stuff. 

The idea of eating cereal with cold milk for breakfast, a staple of the Western daily diet, is not a popular concept in China and other parts of Asia, but cereal company Kellogg's wants to change that. The food giant controls 40% of the global cereal market, but only 2% of its sales come from Asia. With a goal in mind of doubling their revenue in the area by 2009 or 2010, the company is buying up local cereal companies and trying to tailor new products, including hot cereals and cereal bars, to the local palates.

While buying locally producing companies can certainly boost sales in the area, will Kellogg's really be able to convert such a huge population to being cereal eaters? It doesn't seem likely, but given that the company has set a generous deadline, they might just be able to pull it off - even if they have to target the already-present "Western" population in residence.

This month's Saveur magazine has a small story about a new cookbook called The Breakfast Cereal Gourmet. The book, shaped like a cereal box, is the work of David Hoffman, who includes 31 recipes for foods that are made from regular breakfast cereals. However, we're not just talking about Rice Krispies Treats and Corn Flakes-crusted oven fried chicken. The author cook includes recipes from chefs like Annie Miller (Clementine, Los Angeles) and Rick Bayless (Topolobampo and Frontera Grill, Chicago), and have the requirement that the food has to benefit from the inclusion of the cereal, not just have the cereal as some sort of gimmick or garnish.

I'm sure the book has great recipes, and I've certainly tried incorporating bran cereal into a muffin, but I'm just curious as to what other things one could make with breakfast cereals like Cap'n Crunch, Honeycombs, and Pops.

Scientists have answered one of the great unsolved problems of the age - they have found the secret to the perfectly crunchy cornflake.

French boffins down in Nantes have looked at the the cornflake’s 'alveolar structure' (whatever the 'ell that is!)  and have identified the factors affecting its crunchiness. They also used a 'pioneering mechanism' to test the acoustic performance of the 'crunch' and discovered the exact sound that gives the most satisfactory noise when eaten. 

Comparing why the Argentine Plata corn stays flaky when most European varieties do not, they found that crunchiness depends not so much on the manufacturing method as on the 'alveolar structure', in particular the 'interface between proteins and starch'. Professional tasters decreed which flake made the most satisfying sounds in the mouth, and which went soggy in milk and stuck to their palates. Terrible things soggy cornflakes. Keeps me awake at night.

A hot breakfast was the standard prison breakfast for many, many years for the same reasons that oatmeal is a popular breakfast food on the outside: it's healthy, filling and inexpensive. But porridge is off the menus in British prisons, replaced with a "breakfast pack" that costs only 27p per prisoner (about 46¢ US). The reason for the change, according to audit investigators, was "because cooked breakfasts are no longer part of contemporary eating habits in the wider community". Since the prison officials are so on top of food trends, they found it necessary to remove the offending breakfast cereal from their menus.

It is highly that the change was made to save money. While the breakfast pack - which includes 1 cup of breakfast cereal, two slices of bread, jam or marmalade, margarine, tea bags, instant coffee and a small milk cartoon - might cost slightly more per serving than oatmeal, it is given to the prisoners the night before and prepared and eaten by them in the morning. This eliminates the need to have the kitchen staff on hand for one meal every day.