Popcorn Granola? Popcorn Granola.
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At our local Japanese supermarket, it’s usually slim pickings when it comes to cereal. They have Frosted Flakes, some chocolate stuff, basic fruit granola, and that’s about it. Meanwhile, America’s got so many kinds of cereal that Jeremy Renner would rather get blown up in the desert than pick one. It’s sad that a country so drenched in junk food doesn’t know the joy of Peanut Butter Crunch.
As the cereals around here rarely change, it’s startling to see a new one, and very unusual for it to be something I’ve never heard of or even considered before, but that’s just what happened with Kellogg’s Popcorn Granola.
Looks healthy.
This is the caramel flavor, although I have not seen any other flavor of Popcorn Granola besides this one. The bag advertises it as “Saku saku,” which means “crunchy.”
“But Gregg,” you may be saying, “popcorn and granola do not go together, and popcorn does not belong in cereal because wet popcorn is gross.” You know what? I would think so too. But when Japan delivers a snack that sounds weird to me, I go ahead and try it.
Looks like popcorn, tastes like granola.
I ate a couple bites, and to be honest, I didn’t get much in the way of popcorn or caramel flavor. It mostly just tasted like granola to me, which is fine, but there was nothing about it that stood out. Eriko is really the cereal/granola eater in our family, so her opinion was the important one in determining if we’d ever want to buy this again.
"Outside crunchy part granola, inside tastes like caramel popcorn,” she mumbled with food in her mouth. “And maybe we can eat directly.”
No prize inside. Kind of a rip-off.
She was onto something there. After she finished the bowl, we kept snacking on it dry.
Without the milk, it made a pretty good snack, sort of like a healthier Cracker Jack. Eriko complained that it hurt her teeth, so yes, like Cracker Jack.
As a cereal, it wasn’t great, but I found myself grabbing more hunks straight from the bag. The only deterrent to using it as a kind of trail mix is that the chunks were of uneven size. About half of it was big hunks that could easily be munched on while watching TV, and the rest was tiny pieces that would be too annoying to eat except with a spoon.
No bowl = no cleanup!
It was definitely better as a dry snack than a cereal. The popcorn was stale and soft, but the level of sweetness was not as sickening as I thought it might be. I guess I’d rather just have some caramel popcorn and some of that good Nature Valley cereal instead of mixing the two, but if you’re looking for a crunchy snack that pretends to be better for you than a tin of popcorn, you might want to give this stuff a try.
In the end, all it really did was make me want to show my wife all the wonderful cereals we have in America, the land of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Honeycomb and Cracklin’ Oat Bran. The good ol’ USA is still number one in something.
