When I think of Special K cereal, I don’t normally imagine chocolate with it, but that’s about to change. As chocolate (particularly the antioxidant-rich dark variety of chocolate) gets touted as a health food, cereal companies are starting to hop onto a cacao-covered bandwagon.
According to an article in USA Today, Kellogg and Quaker are going to push chocolate varieties of Special K and Life cereals: Special K Chocolatey Delight and Life Chocolate Oat Crunch. Apparently, these aren’t truly “breakfast” cereals as the companies are encouraging folks to indulge in something they’ve already been doing: late-night snacking on sweets.
We already have a wide variety of chocolate cereals, but up until now, they’ve all been marketed for kids. My take? I’d still prefer curling up with a bowl of Cocoa Pebbles than a bowl of Special K, even if it is chocolatey Special K.
- USA Today: Healthy cereals to get taste of chocolate
- Special K Official Site
- Life Cereal (no mention of Chocolate oat crunch as yet)
- Cocoa Pebbles
I know they they have a Special K cereal in Southern France and Italy that has chocolate shavings in it. I wondered how long it’d take from them to bring it to the US. Ha!
January 8th, 2007 at 12:40 pmI am as big of a breakfast cereal addict as you all are addicted to candy– so when I saw the Chocolate Delight Special K at Walmart a couple of weeks ago, I nearly jumped up and down. And of course I took it home.
It was…meh. The flakes were good because they were the same old flakes, covered in a sweet glaze. But the “Chocolate Delight” part? Not so great. They just added little chocolate chunks to the cereal. Not Good chocolate chunks. Waxy chocolate-with-very-little-flavor chunks. The biggest problem was that they sink to the bottom of your bowl so all the flakes get eaten first, and you are left in the end with a bowl full of milk swimming with cold, hard, waxy chocolate chunks. They don’t even turn your milk chocolatey.
I ended up picking all the chocolate out and giving it to my preschooler, who was more than happy to eat all my brown wax. The flakes were better without it. I wish they would have made the FLAKES chocolatey; or at least concocted some kind of chocolate puff or something that added the taste and sweetness of chocolate, because the real thing certainly wasn’t much of a delight.
I might eat it as a snack, but it’s no good with milk. My 2 cents. :)
January 8th, 2007 at 9:39 pmI’m anxious to try the Chocolate Life, though! I haven’t seen it yet– I’ll keep an eye out for it. Chocolate Oat Clusters! See, they should have done something like THAT with the Special K. Thanks for the heads-up!
January 8th, 2007 at 9:43 pmI was very excited to see Chocolate Life cereal in my grocery aisle. I couldn’t wait to get home and try it since Life cereal is by far my favorite. I have to say, however, that the chocolate oat cluster taste disgusting and absolutely ruin the cereal. They are hard and almost don’t taste like chocolate at all. I found myself picking through to eat the Life cereal and finally decided to dump it all out, throw the box in the garbage and have a bowl of normal Life cereal. I guess good ideas don’t always work out . . .
February 2nd, 2007 at 3:11 amOh, dear. It looks like the chocolate cereal for adults idea is a bust. :/ I’m disappointed that the milk doesn’t even turn chocolatey in either the Life or the Special K.
February 2nd, 2007 at 3:28 amI love Life Cereal. There’s just something so unique about the taste and texture that makes it addicting. It’s not an unhealthly sugar puff, so you don’t feel guilty. I love munching Life right out of the box as a snack- no milk needed unless I’m eating breakfast. In fact I’m munching cinnamon Life right now. When I heard of Chocolate Life, I was imagining chocolate flavored Life. I’m not sure I want to try this kind.
February 2nd, 2007 at 9:03 pmi think that taste is number 1 about choosing which breakfast cereal to eat!
February 14th, 2007 at 6:03 pmI own my own brand of functional breakfast cereals/the are called Yogactive/hey are not yet sold in the USA but only in Canada and i have them made in germany!
I feel good about sharing my story about offering a good tasting ceereal that supplies your belly with friendly bacteria that we call probiotic! This is not a gimmic we are for real!
We have 4 flavors and 3 more new flavors on the way to be introduced!
I dont beleive that you have to sacrifice taste for good health i think that science today is staqrting to allow us choices that give us both benefits!
Check me out /tell me what you think/try a box of my cereal/ i am all ears
Daniel Bellas
PS- mY favorite is our real Kiwi flavor recipe of Yogactive
I love the Special K chocolate Delight! I LOVE chocolate! I can not wait to try Life’s chocalate version! Thanks Special K!!!!
February 15th, 2007 at 6:08 pmMarie
I have this cereal and it is really good. It is helping me not eat so much candy as this satisfies some of my chocolate and sugar cravings. I’m very picky on my chocolate, DOVE is my favorite, but the chocolate in Special K is really pretty good and it’s not too much and not too little, just enough to satisfy the craving and the need to eat bags of chocolate. I like it.
February 20th, 2007 at 1:00 pmI would like to add that I do NOT eat it with milk. I eat it as is and don’t eat the chocolate pieces by itself but with the flakes. Then it’s better. Think of it as an alternative to eating sweets, not as a counter part of Coco Puffs, Coco Krispies (my fav)…..
February 20th, 2007 at 1:02 pmI just tried this tonight thinking what a great snack it would be for me instead of ice cream or candy. I need to have chocolate after dinner, it’s just something I have to have. Well, if someone had blindfolded me and put one of the little brown squares in my mouth, I don’t think I could have identified it as chocolate. It ‘s sweet, but with no chocolate flavor at all, and it is so waxy that it stuck to my teeth and didn’t melt away for MUCH longer than chocolate should take to melt away.
The flakes were good as always, but if I wanted flakes I would have just bought plain flakes. I seriously considered putting some Hershey’s syrup on it just so I could get my chocolate fix (I didn’t though.. I decided that would be kinda gross). If you’re a chocolate lover, this cereal is not for you.
February 23rd, 2007 at 9:29 pmThe chocolate crunch in this cereal tastes ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like chocolate to me. Reminiscent of cocoa…vaguely. Chocolate? Definitely not. Don’t they have to test market this stuff? Who on Gods green earth thought this was good? I thought it was practically inedible; the only saving grace was that when you pick out the chocolate pieces ( which I did after the first bowl, rather than throw out the box, which was a viable option) you are still left with the life cereal. I had hight hopes when I bought it, but it was a total waste of money.
March 7th, 2007 at 8:20 am[...] http://candyaddict.com/blog/2007/01/08/special-k-and-life-cereals-go-chocolate/ [...]
March 10th, 2007 at 5:30 amGreat post! I enjoy your blog as much as mine! Thanks for the good information to put on my site as well!
March 10th, 2007 at 5:33 amI just tried the Special K Chocolate Delight and was not delighted. The chocolate has no flavor, and as someone else mentioned, is waxy. I wish they also would add more fiber to the cereal and remove some of the sugar; perhaps replacing it with sucralose or something. This would help to add flavor to the chocolate pieces without cranking up the carb levels, which are already high. You might as well eat a chocolate granola bar snack than eat this cereal. At least it would taste like chocolate!
March 13th, 2007 at 8:22 pm^^^ A healthier alternative to sucralose would be Stevia extract. It’s all natural!!
March 13th, 2007 at 8:25 pmWe love the chocolate delight.. its the bomb digity.. Were on weight watchers, this is a 2 point cereal, very filling, and we don’t mind that the chocolate falls to the bottom, kind of like the desert at the end of a good meal, special K is awesome by itself, but add chocolate and yumm, can’t keep enough of it.. our 12 yr old loves it, she can eat a box in a few days, and its low fat, high in vitamin,s yummy great…
March 19th, 2007 at 1:43 pmI accidentally discovered a way to make the Special K chocolate go from decent to awesome. I left a box of it in the trunk of my car, intending to take it to work, and over the course of a few days, it melted just enough to make yummy chocolate covered flake clusters that are absolutely amazing. No more chocolate sinking to the bottom! So with just a teeny bit of heat, this cereal is now my absolute favorite!
June 28th, 2007 at 1:21 pmThe first time I ate the Chocolate Special K I, too, was not impressed. However, when I went on a diet and got used to no sugar, all of a sudden it tasted pretty good! Really, and truly! THEN I tried Anna’s idea about warming the chocolate a bit. She’s soooooooo right! Once warm, the chocolate adds flavor. I, of course, was eating the Special K, but if the clusters is anything like that, I’m looking forward to trying it!
October 6th, 2007 at 12:59 amHey .. by the way .. I love the idea of a healthy, chocolate cereal that turns the milk slightly chocolatety! Of course, not so much that they have to add sweetener to it. The after-taste would ruin it. Just add a FEW of those flakes that normally change the milk to chocolate should work!
All in all, I’m back eating cereal after all these years, and this has been my very favorite diet ever!
Colby mentioned Stevia…. The FDA has not approved Stevia for consumption as a food product (because of the whole “possible liver damage” thing). Once that happens, we will see Coke with Stevia, Life cereal with Stevia. From what I understand, the cola companies are REALLY working on this happening (and funding a lot of the research).
May 13th, 2008 at 10:14 amI reviewed this cereal recently…after I found it in the 99 cents sore! Ugh. Pretty box, though.
September 18th, 2008 at 11:59 pmI meant store. Funny, though.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:00 am