New Product Review:

Quaker Oatmeal Breakfast Squares

Reviewed by Mr Breakfast on 11/24/2003

Quaker's new Oatmeal Breakfast Squares nearly put me to sleep.

The box gets you excited. It's an attractive, enticing product. The picture makes it look like the crumble topping of a cobbler with lines of decorative icing. They're promoted as moist and chewy oatmeal squares with "all the nutrition of a bowl of instant oatmeal". Unfortunately, the moment you bite down, your taste buds take a snooze.

I tried two varieties. The Baked Apple variety, if scored on its own, would have merited a four out of seven on the golden egg scale. There's nothing special about it, but the flavor of apple has a comforting aspect. It's not bad and it's not great.

The other variety I sampled was Brown Sugar Cinnamon. This was one of the worst products in the breakfast bar category that I've ever tasted. If you made it in your kitchen, you'd throw the batch away and start again. I can best describe it as a doughy clump with very little flavor. What flavor it does have tasted more like meat than pastry (let alone oatmeal). This variety, scored alone, would get a goose egg.

Quaker has given us so many fantastic oatmeal products. It's sad to see this promising experiment fail. I suppose if taking great food and clumping them into package-size squares always worked, we could all have Filet Mignon bars for lunch. Maybe someday. But for now, I'll take my steak on a plate and my oatmeal in a bowl.

A third variety, Oatmeal Raisin, was not tested for this review. The $3.95 price if for a 6-count box of 2.1 ounce squares.

The price we paid: $3.79