This may have been a limited-edition release for Halloween. Well, here at the Institute every day is Halloween.
Overall Rating: 88
Note that the high rating is conditional on your liking the taste of peanut butter. As the saying goes, Your Mileage May Vary. On the other hand, it's a pleasure to detect the actual flavour of peanut butter in a Reese's cereal product.
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| Image from the Institute Collection |
Well, here we go again. It's probably a good thing children have such active imaginations, because it surely requires a more-than-willing suspension of disbelief to see nature's greatest flying mammal (and a totem animal of the Institute) in these deformed monstrosities (and we don't use "monstrosities" in any Halloween-positive sense). You know you're in trouble when the shapes of these cereal pieces not only don't resemble the objects they're supposed to represent (that would be bats), they don't even resemble the sample pieces shown on the box (that would, apparently, be a corn-based model of an over-inflated, deformed pig's bladder). The only positive thing you can say about this is that the misshapen protuberances on the individual pieces make them easier to pick up from a bowl.
Texture and Taste, Dry
Imagine our surprise when, on first sinking a fang into one of these, we encountered the actual flavour of peanut butter. This ought not to have been such a surprise, but our previous encounters with Reese's cereals have been underwhelming in terms of flavour. (The benchmark for peanut butter cereals was, and remains, Cap'n Crunch Peanut Butter Crunch.) With this product, at least, Reese have upped their game, which makes us happy.
The cereal is a single-varietal product: corn is the only grain used. This makes for a light, pleasing snap on first bite (cue the vampire jokes) and a minimal amount of cloying stickiness. You'll still want to brush your teeth after this, or they will stick together, but this product makes for a most pleasing snack out of the box.
Texture and Taste, With Milk
There's a reason kids like a glass of milk with a PBJ sandwich, and the same applies to this PB cereal. (In theory chocolate is involved as well, but this product has even less "chocolate" flavour than any of the others the Institute has sampled.) The corn holds up to the dairy quite well (as is usually the case with corn cereals) and for the real peanut butter fanatics out there, the product won't have a chance to go soggy before it's all been snarfed up. It's interesting: the peanut butter flavour seems stronger at the end of a spoonful than at the start. That's probably what was intended, though: the strong finish encourages you to dip your spoon once again.
A few points are lost because of the non-existence of the chocolate, save for the provision of some questionable colour variation, and because of the way the flavour takes a while to declare itself when taken with milk. But with this product a second bowl is a strong possibility.
Conclusion
We'll be honest: this was a pleasant surprise. The product was purchased on sale, well after Halloween, but it held up quite well. Not everybody out there is going to be a fan of peanut butter, in cereal or otherwise, but if you are, this is a positive choice. Plus, the things are so horribly misshapen that you really could use this product to terrify tiny tots next Halloween. [May 2019]
[Posted a day later than usual in honour of the Victoria Day long weekend.]
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