Quipu

Froot Loops Birthday Cake Flavour

Image courtesy of Chris Smith. This box is
not going into the Institute's collection, folks.

Overall Rating: 40
This is why you don't mess with success.

Appearance
The pink! It burns!

Seriously, though: what happened to the happy riot of colour that was the Loops? These monochrome donuts are dyed a colour that's not quite pink, not quite fuchsia, and not likely to impress anyone outside of the Disney Princess crowd.

Then there's the scent. Well, the smell. Birthday Cake Froot Loops smell like despair and the death of hope at a junior high school dance, at least when you first open the box. We suppose it's a good thing, then, that the very strong hint of artificial strawberry on the nose vanishes within a few days. And we suspect this stuff might still be taking up space in the pantry after a few days.

Taste and Texture, Dry
What taste? This product doesn't even taste overwhelmingly sweet out of the box. And there isn't a hint of anything fruit-like to it. Or froot-like, for that matter: the citric-acid blast of what we will now refer to as real Froot Loops is not even a memory here. There's a good light crunch that would justify a bit of mindless snacking while watching some of the more forgettable Hanna-Barbera creations of the mid-1960s (Peter Potamus, I'm looking at you), but for high-quality animation, save yourself for something better.

Taste and Texture, With Milk
Okay, adding milk does unveil a slight hint of vanilla that's not too unpleasant. And the oxidizing that takes place once the bag has been opened reduces the initial, overwhelming, fake-strawberry misery to the point where it's just tolerable. The product holds its crunch reasonably well (a good thing, because it took us longer than it should have to finish our test bowl); at the same time the oat flour is not to horribly in evidence. This is all faint praise, though: while there have certainly been kiddyrot cereals much, much worse than this, it's not really a compliment to say so. And while we at the Institute like birthday cake (we've certainly eaten enough of it), we would not want even a small slice of a cake that tasted like this.

Conclusion
Is the modern kiddyrot marketplace so jaded that even a cereal as classic as Froot Loops has to be mucked around with? This regrettable exercise is (supposedly) going to vanish from the shelves fairly soon. It won't be soon enough.