New Product Review:

Chocolate Oat Crunch Life

Reviewed by Mr Breakfast on 1/24/2007

I had high hopes for this cereal. Cinnamon Life cereal is my second all-time favorite cereal. As both a chocolate lover and a fan of Life cereal, I'm sad to report that this new cereal is a disappointment.

The first bowl I tried was terribly bland. There were very few "chocolate flavored oat clusters" and they barely impacted the flavor. What I seemed to have was a bowl of ordinary Life cereal with a more natural oat-like flavor and few chocolate specs. Yawn.

Shake up the box.

As the week progressed, I discovered that the small chocolate clusters had settled to the bottom of the box. Every subsequent bowl I had was a little more interesting, but never anything to get excited about.

Near the bottom of the box, I finally had a bowl where my spoon actually looked the spoon on the cover of the box - two chocolate clusters to every six or seven cereal pieces. It finally started tasting like a cereal that deserved to have the word chocolate in its name. Unfortunately - despite the "made with REAL CHOCOLATE" claim on the box - the chocolate in this cereal tastes mildly synthetic. Count Chocula and Cocoa Puffs have more authentic chocolate flavor.

My biggest complaint is about the texture of the chocolate "clusters". They're very small and compact and maintain a serious crunch in milk. But the crunch is more like a mistake. Imagine eating a soft, moist muffin and you bite into something crunchy. You'd be inclined to spit your bite into a napkin and make sure there wasn't something strange in your muffin. The texture of this cereal can be simulated by pouring some Grape-Nuts into a bowl of Life Cereal. They both have great textures, but they're not meant to be together.

This is strike two for Quaker and Life cereal. In early 2006, they introduced Vanilla Yogurt Crunch Life. "They taste kind of musty... kind of old," read a portion of our review for that cereal.

If our friends at Life cereal want to keep experimenting with clusters, they need to eat some of their competition. There's been great advancements in nuggets and clusters over the last two years (see Kellogg's Caramel Nut Crunch and Cran-Vanilla Crunch).

Sadly, the final word on this new cereal is that Chocolate Oat Crunch Life is pretty lifeless. No one will be dying to try a second bowl of this Life.

The price we paid: $3.99