Diet Coke-Babies

When it comes to food being re-themed for a holiday, Christmas reigns supreme, followed by Halloween.  Unfortunately, many companies take the lazy route for Halloween, and just make the packaging “spooky” or add some token Halloween aspect. 

Plenty of offenders can be seen here: Krave, Lucky Charms Treats, Mini Oreos, and more just repackage to get on the Halloween bandwagon.  Quaker at least had the decency to add some orange and black sprinkles to their granola bars to get their foot in the haunted door.  The Cadbury Screme egg is another example of companies doing just slightly more than the bare minimum to get their products qualified to be in a Halloween display.

So when companies legitimately re-theme a product through at least something of a significant change, it is always greatly appreciated.

Halloween Crunch is not a new release.  But when the good Cap’n is willing to go the extra mile to decorate his ship’s food for Halloween, it deserves special notice. 

This year’s box design is nice and eye-catching.  Lots of Halloween orange and various shades of green.  When did we all agree that green was allowed to be a Halloween color?  I guess it’s the color of… slime?  Between the box, the milk (which we’ll get to), and lots of other companies splashing green all over their Halloween boxes, somehow this became an acceptable themed hue. 

To me, Halloween’s official colors will always be orange and black.  If it’s good enough for the wrappers of those peanut butter chews, that’s enough for me.

The green shade had me convinced the box should glow in the dark.  Despite my insistence that these shades of green must indicate glowing in the dark, it doesn’t.  Feel free to try, though.  It will provide seconds of entertainment!

The promise of the ghosts turning the milk green had me more excited than I care to admit.  I was really hoping the color change wouldn’t be a let down, since I had based so many of my recent life goals on this miraculous change.

The back of the box is a slight step up from the “Mazes and Puzzles” you usually get when a kids cereal refuses to include a prize.  The Cap’n Crunch jack-o-lantern stencil is at least unique.  Although I am not going to use it – carving a pumpkin is a once a year thing for me due to the grotesque seed removal process, and incredibly unpleasant smell.  So if I’m carving one pumpkin, unfortunately the Cap’n’s head is not my go-to design.

The back is also chock full of pumpkin facts.  By “chock full” I mean four, but I think we can agree four facts about pumpkins is enough.

Reviewing the cereal itself is a quick and easy process: It’s Crunch Berries.  The berries have been replaced with orange ghosts, and that’s about it for the difference.

The taste was good, since Crunch Berries are a reliable cereal.  But the pressing concern was the milk change.  My bowl had one green-spotted ghost, and I was worried that this ghost would be responsible for changing all of the milk.  While making my way through the cereal, however, more ghosts became green-spotted as the milk wore them down.

The color change took effect fairly quickly – these ghosts were efficient.  Another plus was that it wasn’t a pale, “Hey, we tried” shade of green.  The milk got legitimately green-ified.  If the Hulk had a cereal, this is the color the milk should become.

So kudos to the Cap’n for his solid Halloween release.  Halloween Crunch is fully themed, from the box to the cereal to the gimmick.  Next year, include a prize in the box and it will cement Halloween Crunch in the holiday-themed food hall of fame.