New Trends in Breakfast Cereal

I've been eating an odd cereal for breakfast lately. I've had cereal for breakfast on most days since I was a little kid. My mother, not wanting to get up at the break of dawn, which I had a tendency to do at the time, would leave a bowl of cereal on the table and a glass of milk to pour over it in the fridge so I could make my own breakfast from a young age. Although I've gotten over it a bit as I've gotten older, for a long time it didn't feel entirely like I'd had breakfast if it didn't include a little bit of cereal. Consequently, when there are new cereals, I'm curious to give them a try.

One cereal that bored me as a kid but that I've actually come to enjoy as an adult is Special K. Like a lot of product lines, lately, they've been trying to expand the brand with variations on the theme. They've added pieces of freeze-dried strawberries, vanilla-flavored with almonds, and fruit and hard pieces of yogurt, among other things. But a new version has come on the market, and it seems an odder choice than these others, which at least make some sort of breakfast sense. The new product is Special K Chocolatey Delight. There are actually pieces of some sort of chocolate substance mixed in with the Special K flakes. Now, I'm not sure exactly how the government defines chocolate, but I can only guess that it's for some other substance than what's in this cereal. The name is "Chocolatey Delight," and the come on on the box promises "chocolatey pieces." You know they're only using that y at the end of the word because they have to, because whatever these pieces are, they're not strictly defined chocolate.

But aside from all that, how does the cereal taste? We've had Cocoa Puffs, Cocoa Krispies, Count Chocula, and probably many others that escape my mind right now for years, so it's not as though chocolate has never been a part of breakfast before. But I'm not afraid to admit that I've never had a bowl of Special K and thought, "If only there were some chocolate in here" (though it wouldn't surprise me in the least if someone actually had). In my mind, the chocolatey pieces don't really add that much to the breakfast experience, but they don't detract from it, either. The big problem they do have, though, is that they don't float. Some of the pieces may be on top of a flake of Special K, or something, but for the most part, all the chocolatey material sinks to the bottom of the milk and is difficult to pick up on your spoon. I sometimes had to move them to the edge of the bowl and then eat them from there.

All this may not be the problem that it sounds, though. According to this article from the end of last year in USA Today, Special K Chocolatey Delight is expected to serve more as an after-dinner snack rather than a breakfast cereal. So, what, are we supposed to eat it straight out of the box, with no milk, at all? The best place to sell before-bed snacks might not be the cereal aisle. The article mentions that there's now a Life Chocolate Oat Crunch cereal, as well, but I haven't tried that one yet. The best line in the article comes from a nutritionist at Stanford: "Is cabernet going into cereal next?" I don't doubt that it's in the pipeline.

Here's the Special K Website. It's a flash site, though, so I don't know how to offer a link any more specific than the home page. If you're interested, you'll have to click through to find the Chocolatey Delight yourself.