Dangerous Dining with Alex #12

/ Alex Good

Tim Hortons Apple Fritter Cereal

Overview: An iconic Canadian brand enters the breakfast cereal market with a Post crossover of one of their best-loved donuts. At least I’m calling their apple fritters a donut because they’re baked. But some people would argue the point.

Label: Well, this really is the story isn’t it? The day before posting this review there was a story on the CBC website headlined “Bowled over: Why some Canadians are feeling duped by their breakfast cereal.” The big sticking point with labels on breakfast cereal is, and always has been, whether they include the milk you put on it with the total. Now some companies do you the courtesy of stating if the nutritional values are including milk, and in the case of this box of Apple Fritter cereal they have two columns, with and without a half cup of skim milk (yeah, as if I have any skim milk in my house). However, a lot of cereal packaging does not, which might confuse some people, especially if they’re expecting a big whack of protein. The other bit of misleading information that’s often included has to do with the presence of real fruit in fruit cereals. That can be trickier. I mean, this box says there are “no artificial flavours,” which didn’t make any sense to me. According to the ingredients listed there aren’t any apples in it so . . .

I guess it depends how you define artificial and natural. I take it these words have a technical or legal meaning, but I’m not sure what it is.

Since I always add fruit to my breakfast cereal and I sure wasn’t expecting anything healthy out of the box for a cereal based on apple fritters, this didn’t bother me. But what did was that comparing labels for different cereals is so hard. This is because they are all based on the nutritional values per one cup of cereal. But one cup is 32 grams of Apple Crisp, 43 grams of Honey Bunches of Oats, 55 grams of Shreddies, and a whopping 102 grams of Honey Nut Harvest Crunch (these are all drawn from what I have in my cereal cupboard currently). So if you want to compare them you have to get out a calculator.

I did my best with the math and was actually a bit surprised to see that Apple Fritter Cereal didn’t come off badly at all. Basically most of these cereals are pretty close in terms of sugar. Shreddies does better with fibre, which Apple Fritter Cereal has almost none of. But the bottom line is that this wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. A lot better for you than an actual Tim Hortons Apple Fritter. Donuts are deadly. With (skim) milk, a bowl of this cereal is 170 calories, with 2-3 grams of fat. An apple fritter donut at Tims is 330 calories with 11 grams of fat. Look, nobody thinks breakfast cereal is good for you. But compared to donuts or a muffin, it’s a lifesaving choice.

Review:

The flipside of this being not as devastating as I was expecting nutritionally is that the taste was quite disappointing. I thought I was going to be blown away by apple cinnamon flavour, but in this regard it doesn’t hold a candle to Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. In fact, I didn’t think there was much taste here at all. In shape and texture, the individual “fritters” closely resemble pieces of Cap’n Crunch, but that’s where the resemblance ends. Say what you want about Cap’n Crunch, but that cereal has zip. This was bland, and not in the least filling. I’m not hating on it or saying it’s inedible, but given that I have a list now of a half-dozen or so go-to breakfast cereals I can’t imagine I’ll try it again.

Price: $2.88 on sale.

Score: 4 / 10

Dangerous Dining

25 thoughts on “Dangerous Dining with Alex #12”

  1. OR….
    you could pull out a one cup measure and pour the cereal into it. That’s one reason I am not a big fan of the metric weight measuring system. Give me that decimal units for distances, that’s fine, but a cup is a cup is a cup. None of this based on weight kind of thing. If you HAVE to deal with grams, at least eat some honey grahams to help deal with the stress of it.

    As for people freaking out about the nutrition label. I am at a loss. I’ve been reading nutrition labels since the mid 90s, so I don’t know if people are just stupid (probably) or they’re just whining to get attention (also probably), but it’s not rocket science. At least if you’re using your cup measure and not your gram measure 😉

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  5. Computer was supplied with the wrong charger, which was causing all sorts of chaos. Thank you for your patience. Frosties, Ricicles and Coco-Pops are the healthiest cereals, the rest of them, you might as well eat the packets.

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