Jamelle Bouie Reviews Kellogg’s Apple Jacks Caramel Cereal

Kellogg’s Apple Jacks Caramel cereal is fall-appropriate, but is it good?

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Updated February 02, 2021

Welcome back to Cereal Eats, the column in which Jamelle Bouie offers an on-camera review of an oddball cereal of his choice—the odder the better—once a month. If you missed the column from last month, check it out here. And if you have any oddball breakfast cereal tips, suggestions, or other pressing cereal intel, drop a note in the comments or email us!

Ah, autumn! A time for flannel shirts and shawl collar cardigans and “pumpkin spice” and mulled wine and hot apple cider!

It's also, apparently, a time for new, seasonal flavors of old favorites. That’s why I tried Kellogg’s Apple Jacks cereal with caramel for this month’s video. And my verdict?

This is, quite possibly, the worst thing I’ve ever eaten.

I've never liked artificial apple flavor that much, and in my opinion Apple Jacks are a middle-tier cereal. Somehow, that artificial flavor becomes even worse when paired with fake caramel, turning a merely tolerable cereal into something truly awful.

There are other problems, of course. This cereal smells terrible, it gets soggy very quickly, and the leftover cereal milk isn’t great either. But all of these are downstream of the basic fact that this was a bad idea, and should have never been tried.

Verdict: 0 spoons.

The opinions expressed are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Serious Eats staff.