¡Zucaritas, chicas! (Kellogg's Chocolate Frosties Cereal & Milk Bar)

Member Name: zoe_page_1

Product:	Kellogg's Chocolate Frosties Cereal & Milk Bar
Date:	04/10/08 (360 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Handy for on the go, added vitamins, tasty

Disadvantages: Too small to count as a proper meal

Breakfast, my favourite meal of the day, differs in every country. In Germany it's pretty standard to have a "second breakfast" when you get to work or school. It comes from eating the first one at some un-godly hour, and getting hungry again by 9am when it's still ages to lunch. It's not quite the same in Mexico, where you can sit down to waffles or pancakes or chilaquiles in many a local cafe or chain restaurant, unless, that is, you're an English teacher. And you teach Business English. To busy executives. Who favour the 7am or 7pm schedule. These unlucky people never really have time for a proper breakfast on work days, so snacks sometimes suffice.

Cereal bars are a great invention, and those containing chocolate a fantastic one. I mean, where else could you get a relatively healthy and extremely tasty chocolate fix for a mere 100 calories or so? In the UK I like the chocolate Frosties ones, and will eat the Coco-pops ones at a pinch. Here in Mexico they all taste different, and my favourites are these, the basic Frosties Cereal and Milk bars.

The bars are made from proper Kellogg's Frosties and milk, and come with a "chocolate flavour" coating on the bottom. They do not look especially appealing (think baby sick...with chunky bits) but they taste good and if you eat them straight from the packet you don't have to look at them. The bars do not contain a lot of milk - I think they only use it to stick the frosted flakes together to make them easier to eat - but you can taste it, especially if like me you prefer your regular bowl of Frosties sin-leche (Cornflakes require OJ, Frosties one eats dry, y'know). The chocolate flavoured coating tastes like, well chocolate flavouring. Or maybe cheap chocolate, the stuff you get in the pound shop with the funny Polish or Turkish writing on it. It's edible, but it's hardly Milka or Cadbury's. Overall the product is sweet but not too bad for most people - it's not sickly, but you never can quite believe you're eating something healthy. There is a slight sweet after taste, like you get with chewing gum, but it doesn't taste too artificial, and the best bit is I don't find these stick to my teeth the way dry cereal does (important for me as I brush then leave the house on my way to class).

One of my favourite things about the bars is that they are nice and crunchy, as freshly opened cereals always are. This means my body registers that I am eating when I have one, unlike with chocolate when I have been known to inhale. I also read somewhere that it's better to have crunchy foods than smooth ones for this precise reason, as a lot of hunger is psychological and therefore your body will calm down only when it thinks it's getting fed.

Do these bars a good breakfast make? Not really - at 90 calories they're a little small for me, but they can get me through an hour and a half of 1-to-1 discussion on Sarah Palin in a morning in the same way a bowl of cereal would. The bonus is you can eat them on the go, and I often do as I'm heading through the park towards one of the companies I work in. Each bar is a reasonable size, and comes individually wrapped, either on its own or in a box of 6.Though not green to have so much plastic, this wrapping does make them perfect for throwing in your bag, and they are pretty sturdy, so though the odd one might snap in half, they don't tend to get crushed.


I suppose if I wanted to eat a heartier breakfast, I could eat two or three of these...but I would probably die of sugar overload. Though low in calories and fat (2g per bar), they are about a third sugar which means over 7g sugar per little 21g bar. Maybe Kellogg's will complement their Low Sugar Frosties with Low Sugar Frosties Bars one day, but they've not done so yet. The upside if you can look past the sugar statistic, is that like most cereals these have added vitamins and iron. You can get 15% of your* RDA of Vitamin A from one of these bars, 10% of your Calcium, 20% of your Vitamin C and 10% of your Iron among others.

(NB: These are based on a Mexican's RDA...and it always points out on the packets here that they are Mexican RDAs, so it might be slightly different for the rest of the world. Me, I'm being Mexican for a while).


I do not pretend to myself that these are healthy bars, but I think they are slightly more nutritious than proper chocolate, and no worse than a bowl of Frosties which, as cereal, is classed as healthy by many people. I know I've talked about breakfast, but in reality I eat mine all day long. For a mid-morning snack. For pudding when I want something chocolaty but without the fat. For a pre-gym "dinner" snack when I won't have the chance to eat my proper meal for another 3 or 4 hours.

I can't fault these bars - they're tasty, convenient and get me through for a few hours until I can grab something a bit more proper. I don't think you can moan about these being sweet anymore than could moan about coke or hot fudge sundaes both being full of sugar. If you don't like sweet things, you clearly won't like these, end of story.

Available in all good supermarkets, chemists and newsagents, even in Mexico. About £1.50 for a box of 6 (slightly less in this part of the world)

www.kelloggs.co.uk gives full ingredients listings if you have allergies. As a mini-summary may contain soy, barley and milk ingredients. Suitable for Vegetarians and Halal certified


"Zucaritas" is the Mexican name for Frosties, so the title loosely translated means "Frosties, baby!"

Summary: Swet but not sickly cereal bars