The Good: Nutritious, Affordable, Nice sweet taste.
The Bad: With milk, it is not flavorful enough
The Basics: General Mills Peanut Butter Cheerios cereal is good, but might be one of the best examples of a cereal that is better before it is added to milk!
Lately, my local grocery store has been putting all sorts of cereals on sale and I thought that was a great time to start picking up breakfast cereal again and reviewing them! My first of the new cereal reviews is Multigrain Cheerios Peanut Butter flavor. And it’s good, but it does not truly hold its own against skim milk, which makes it a tougher sell to someone like me, who loves full, robust, flavors.
Basics
General Mills Peanut Butter Cheerios cereal is a new twist on an old cereal – Cheerios has been around my entire life! It looks like a mostly smooth ring made of baked corn, oats or some blend of rice, sorghum, and barley. The corn Cheerios in this mix are bright yellow, the oat Cheerios are dull brown, the other Cheerios are a lighter brown, much like regular Cheerios. Each Cheerios ring is approximately 1/2” in diameter and about 1/8” tall.
The standard box of Peanut Butter Cheerios cereal is 11.3 oz. That represents approximately eleven servings and that seems to be accurate given my experience so far. This cereal is comprised of just the cereal rings themselves, with nothing else in them. All three types of Cheerios seem to be mixed in with equal frequency.
Ease Of Preparation
Peanut Butter Cheerios cereal is a breakfast cereal, so this is one of the low-impact breakfast options as far as preparation goes! Simply open the box of Peanut Butter Cheerios cereal, pour out a three-quarter cup serving (I recommend actually using a measuring cup, especially if you are monitoring your intake) and add 1/2 cup of milk to it. I have discovered, as part of getting healthy, that one of the biggest challenges one might have with breakfast cereal is actually eating the serving size recommended by the manufacturer. This is not a problem with Peanut Butter Cheerios, though, as the 3/4 cup serving seems to be a pretty decent amount of the cereal!
For the purposes of my reviews, and my regular consumption, I only use skim milk (fat free) milk with cereal.
Taste
Peanut Butter Cheerios smells strongly of peanut butter. In fact, anyone who loves peanut butter will be enticed by the aroma from this cereal, which is nice.
As for taste, dry Peanut Butter Cheerios cereal is dominated by the dry flavor of peanuts and that flavor quickly dissipates. The flavor of peanuts is replaced by the grainy, but sweet, flavor of the multigrain Cheerios. The aftertaste from the dry Multigrain Peanut Butter Cheerios is exactly what one expects from peanut butter. The flavor is nutty with a hint of something oily. That secondary flavor is the embodiment of peanut butter flavor.
Drenched in milk, the Peanut Butter Cheerios lose most of their flavor. They are consistently sweet, but the peanut butter flavor that these Cheerios possess when dry seems to wash off into the milk. The milk has a nutty taste, even when the Cheerios take on a generically sweet, overly grainy flavor. There is no strong aftertaste to the cereal after it has been placed in milk.
Nutrition
General Mills Peanut Butter Cheerios cereal is fairly nutritious on its own and with skim milk! Made primarily of whole grain corn, sugar, and peanut butter. Most of the ingredients, before the added vitamins and minerals, are easily identifiable in the Peanut Butter Cheerios. This cereal has some preservatives in it, but it also has a separate list of vitamins and minerals, which implies that this is another cereal that has nutrients sprayed onto it. That makes it very important to drink the milk after one has consumed the actual cereal.
A single serving of General Mills Peanut Butter Cheerios cereal is 28 grams, 3/4 cups. In that serving, there are 110 calories, with 15 calories coming from fat. There are no saturated or trans fats in this cereal, nor is there any cholesterol. With 130 mg of sodium and 2 grams of dietary fiber, this is not a bad dietary choice for those striving to improve heart health. With two grams of protein and 85mg potassium, Peanut Butter Cheerios is not the absolute healthiest cereal on the market, but it is a decent start to one’s day, at least on the dietary front. On its own, this cereal has significant percentages of eight vitamins and minerals, most notably 50% of the RDA of Folic Acid!
Storage/Cleanup
Peanut Butter Cheerios is a cereal, so as long as it is kept sealed in its box, it ought to remain fresh for quite some time. The box of Peanut Butter Cheerios cereal I purchased two weeks ago had an expiration date of February 17, 2015. I am quite positive it will be gone well before then. Obviously, when you are done pouring the cereal from the box, fold down the plastic inner wrap to help maintain the cereal’s freshness.
Cleaning up after Peanut Butter Cheerios cereal is simple as well. Simply brush away crumbs left by it and you are done! It is that simple! This is a cereal that does not discolor the milk added to it, but even though one should drink that up to get all the vitamins and minerals General Mills added to the cereal, they do not risk staining their clothes from potential spills.
Overall
Peanut Butter Cheerios cereal is healthy, but it is not a powerful-enough peanut butter flavor to make it a must-buy. Even so, it is worth trying, even if just for the novelty!
For other flavors of Cheerios, please be sure to check out my reviews of:
Cinnamon Burst Cheerios
Dulce De Leche Cheerios
Chocolate Cheerios
6/10
For other food reviews, please visit my Food Review Index Page for an organized listing of all the food reviews I have written!
© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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