Cracker Jack Cereal – A Carnival in a Bowl
Picture this: you’re at a baseball game, crunching on those sticky-sweet treats everyone knows and loves. Now imagine that same experience in cereal form, complete with prizes inside every box. A magazine ad introducing this cereal in 1983 read, “Introducing Cracker Jack brand Cereal. Nutritious golden puffs of cracklin’ crunch and a prize in every box.” Packing a caramelly, corny, and malty flavor, this cereal packed quite a sugary punch – not to mention it kept up the Cracker Jack tradition of including plenty of fun prizes. In fact, think of old Cracker Jack Cereal boxes as essentially time capsules for classic ’80s toys.
One such box had a winning ticket for an Autobot Transformer toy while another offered prizes like a portable AM/FM radio/cassette boombox and a BMX bike. Kids would literally tear through their breakfast just to get to the bottom of the box. Ralston unveiled the cereal in 1983 and discontinued it not long after for undisclosed reasons. Yet, time hasn’t been kind to Cracker Jack Cereal, which has since been lumped together with wild ideas of yesteryear like Frito-Lay Lemonade and Crystal Pepsi.
Crazy Cow – The Cereal That Changed Your Milk
Amidst the many health food phenomena of the 1970s, General Mills marketed a cereal that was proudly and abundantly loaded with sugar. Crazy Cow, making its way to store shelves throughout the 1970s, initially came in a flagship chocolate flavor, billed as “the frosted cereal that makes chocolate flavored milk.” This wasn’t just any ordinary cereal – it was basically two breakfast treats in one. The kind of crazy thing… ahem… about Crazy Cow cereal is that while more like Kix than Trix, in this case General Mills added a drink mix coating to the cereal pieces. So when you poured your milk on Crazy Cow it would become a tasty treat to drink after your cereal was finished – say like something similar to Nesquik!
The cereal was released in the late 1970s and saw a big push in sales from Star Wars fans when they started putting trading cards in the boxes. Created with a cereal mascot already in place – a visibly unhinged smiling farm animal, Crazy Cow, apparently already loaded up on sugar – the cereal disappeared from supermarkets by 1980. That chocolate or strawberry milk at the end? Pure magic for kids of the era.
Ice Cream Cones Cereal – Dessert for Breakfast Dreams
If someone told you that you could have ice cream for breakfast and your parents would approve, you’d probably think they were pulling your leg. But for a brief, glorious moment in the late eighties, that fantasy became reality. Ice cream cone cereal is making a comeback on TikTok, and it’s becoming a favorite for people to make ice cream cereal. But let’s be real; none will ever be as strong as the Ice Cream Cones Cereal from 1986. This cereal was the real deal, featuring a mix of vanilla or chocolate chip-flavored puffs and conical Chex-like pieces enjoyed with milk.
Ice Cream Cones Cereal came about in 1987, courtesy of General Mills. The cereal had two different shapes: round corn pieces to resemble scoops of vanilla ice cream and brown, triangular pieces to look like ice cream cones. Unfortunately, the cereal flew a little too close to the sun, getting pulled from the shelves in one year. The cereal was brought back ever so briefly in 2003 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ice cream cone, but fans were slightly dismayed to notice that the cones themselves were now flat triangles rather than actual cones.
C-3PO’s Cereal – When the Force Met Breakfast
“Star Wars” mania was still in full swing (and, let’s be honest, it still is over 40 years later) when C3PO’s appeared on store shelves, and despite being far less colorful than other popular cereals, kids couldn’t get enough. The cereal pieces were shaped like figure eights to vaguely resemble asteroids and were made of a blend of wheat and corn. They had a mild honey flavor, maybe as a reference to C-3PO’s golden, shiny hue. Actor Anthony Daniels donned his golden suit once again to make an appearance in the ad for C3PO’s, which advertised the collectible stickers and trading cards that came in each box.
Some boxes even featured a large image of Luke Skywalker’s face, which kids could cut out and turn into a mask to make their Star Wars action role playing games all the more realistic. The marketing was brilliant, but sadly, the Force wasn’t with this cereal for long. C3PO’s reign over the breakfast aisle was short lived. It was discontinued in 1986, only two years after its release.
Pac-Man Cereal – Breakfast Gaming Before It Was Cool
Long before anyone dreamed of streaming video game content or eating while playing, General Mills created the perfect marriage of gaming and breakfast. Pac-Man was featured everywhere, from clothes to TV cameos, and – of course – in our breakfast. Pac-Man cereal (branded as just Pac-Man) was full of round, yellow corn cereal that looked very much like the titular character, plus marshmallows in the shape of his favorite things to eat: Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde.
You better believe that kids would take the marshmallows and cereal pieces out of the bowl, much to the dismay of their parents, in order to re-create the legendary game on their breakfast tables. Pac-Man cereal was introduced to grocery store shelves by General Mills in 1983, three years after the game was first launched. But it ceased to exist come 1988, when more advanced games were starting to take the place of the humbler Pac-Man. General Mills succeeded because most of us don’t remember Donkey Kong cereal, but we remember the Pac-Man breakfast nearly as vividly as we can recall the game itself.
OJ’s Cereal – When Orange Juice Met Its Match
Some cereal ideas sound great in theory but turn out to be disasters in practice. OJ’s cereal was definitely one of those “seemed like a good idea at the time” products. Television commercials for breakfast cereal always feature a glass of orange juice alongside the cereal bowl, so Kellogg’s likely thought to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, and turn the juice into cereal. OJ’s cereal was said to contain all the vitamin C of a 4-ounce glass of orange juice (so, half a glass of orange juice) and the delicious, juicy citrus taste that kids love.
The mascot for OJ’s was a wranglin’ cowboy by the name of OJ Joe (there seems to be a theme of unimaginativeness with these cereal mascots) who would round up oranges into a pen to later be squeezed into OJ’s. The cereal is a bit of a controversial pick for this list – some folks remember it fondly, associating the taste with summer mornings in the mid-’80s, reveling in no school and Saturday morning cartoons. Others despised the cereal, and we can’t say we blame them; orange juice and milk are a notoriously dastardly combo. Nevertheless, the cereal was released in 1985 and subsequently discontinued soon afterward in 1986, likely due to a general distaste for orange combined with milk.
The Sweet Science Behind Why These Cereals Vanished
You might be wondering why all these amazing-sounding cereals disappeared while boring old Cheerios and Frosted Flakes are still chugging along. The truth is, the cereal industry is incredibly competitive and trends change faster than kids can say “more sugar, please.” Cereals can even be time capsules of how people ate breakfast in a certain era, and for a variety of reasons economic, social, and cultural, some just don’t exist anymore. We won’t and can’t let cereal die, and so here are some long disappeared but still fondly remembered cereals that we’ll probably never eat again.
Several factors may be responsible for a product being removed from a store’s inventory. It can come down to low customer demand, high production costs, or simply making room for newer products. Sometimes cereals that seem destined for greatness just can’t find their audience quickly enough. While trends have shifted toward health-conscious blends, plenty of us still long for the technicolor mascots and over-the-top flavors of discontinued classics. Let’s remember the 20 cereals that deserve a triumphant return.
