How often do we see someone really pave a new path in the cereal world? For the most part, I would say that it's just variations on the same. This time it's rice. This time it's corn. This time it's rice on one side, corn on the other (but really, how does Crispix do it?) This time it tastes like apples (or doesn't. Apple jacks--possibly the biggest ploy of cereal advertising). So, honestly, I was really nervous about the idea of putting fruit directly into the cereal box when special K first created special K with strawberries. I know it's actually called special K with "red berries" but red berries could be so many things. Rasp, boysen, strawb. The term red berry seems so much more broad than it has to be.
1. How could they really make a fruit last in a cardboard box traveling around the country all the way from Battle Creek, Michigan (the factory of special K) to WesShop, CT? They must have to do something really unnatural to fresh strawberries to make them not real food or something.
2. Would it taste like a fresh, real strawberry once it eventually makes it to my bowl or would it just be a milky damp dried strawberry?
Obviously, I'm a big proponent of fruit in cereal. I think a bowl of cereal is almost always improved by some chopped up bananas or strawberries, or some sprinkled in blueberries. I even went through a phase where I would put frozen chocolate chips into my Life cereal. That was a weird time in my life.
Perishables just never seemed like they had a place inside the box. Until this, I think it was exclusively grains, nuts, and sometimes chocoalte...and marshmellows...and chocolate chip cookies. I guess if they can make cereal out of chocolate chip cooooooookies [crisp], they should be able to figure out how to put strawberries in cereal. And really, how far of a stretch is it from raisins to dried strawberries? Why should the way that a fruit is dried (either sun or freeze) totally change the way it's perceived. So, I had a change of heart. Maybe this freeze dried strawberry craze is something to look into.
Apparently, I was not the only one to subscribe to the freeze-dried revolution. Special K with "red berries" (SKwRB) was here to stay. I got the inside scoop from a woman at Usdan (Wesleyan dining hall) who apparently said that SKwRB goes about 5 times as fast as any other cereal. In addition to hungry Wesleyan students, other cereal companies seem really interested in the power of switching strawberries from DIY to prepackaged. Honey Bunches of Oats (HBOO) also has recently come out with a HBOO with strawberries. However, it seems like HBOO, a cereal that I thought could do no wrong, only managed to get the name of the berry (at least they don't call them "red berries" or sliced berries or "good berries" or something else nondescript like that) right with this new creation. The cereal doesn't support the berry in the same way that special K does. It just seems like a strange, forced pairing (kind of like Wesleyan and football. HUZZAH) unlike the way that SKwRB feels much more natural. Furthermore, the strawberries are inferior to "red berries" of Special K. They basically validated all the fears that I had for freeze-dried fruit. They don't really have any bite, or any of the taste of fresh strawberries. I would compare them more to thin crisps of styrofoam with the strawberry taste of a jolly rancher as opposed to anything natural.
I guess the prepackaged fruit craze, as with any revolution, needs to be done right. Don't just go freeze-drying fruit left and right. Think twice, do it right, keep it realeal.
