Though 2019 has (at least, as of me writing this) yet to liberate me with its arbitrarily assigned opportunity for self-improvement and rebirth, I’m already esophagus-deep in the new year’s first trimester of fresh cereal madness.

Yes, to the bittersweet disdain of resolution-makers everywhere, the cereal industry always chooses to debut the bulk of its innovative ideas right around January. This means while others are hitting the gym, I’m working up a knuckle sweat trying to cover everything. So please bear with me if it takes a little while for me to review every Sourly Patched Kid and Honeyed Bun—the light at the end of the carpal tunnel is still but a sugary twinkle.

Though of course, that doesn’t mean I can’t make time for a Cerealously tradition: ranking my favorite releases of the previous year, to try and make some quasi-academic at best conclusion about who ‘won’ the last 365-day cereal war. 2018 was a year of much shade-slinging and cereal creativity. In fact, since there were so many good peripheral breakfast products this year, I’m opening up the rankings beyond just plain, milk-able cereals.

This is a rule I’ve already historically stretched, so I’m sure no one will mind if I turn this cereal blog into a brief breakfast bonanza. For richer or pourer, let’s do it!

5. Pop-Tarts Strawberry Cheesecake Splitz

“When the ‘berry half’s scarlet jelly meets Cheesy C.’s smooth ivory innards, the result is stunning: sharp bite and light fruit collide to make a unique Pop-Tart experience that’s somewhere between a Strawberry Hostess Cupcake and a sour cream doughnut.”

Kicking off the list with something that’s definitely not a cereal (according to most ‘conventional’ consumption methods), it’s the decidedly better halves of Pop-Tarts recent Splitz series: Strawberry Cheesecake.

While the ol’ Pop-Tart high-five isn’t new, nor is the near-universally beloved Strawberry half, the Cheesecake side of this epic Gilga-mashup brings rich and tangy depth to a hitherto simply satisfying fruit flavor. Eaten together, both sides bring cosmic balance, as decadence and dependability become something greater than the sum of its Tarts.

Now if only there were some sort of Factory that made only Cheesecake Pop-Tart halves, so I could glue them to other DIY-dissected toaster pastries with a fine mascarpone binding agent.

4. Millville Snickerdoodle Kookies

“Milk’s liquid entropy allows for a festive union of golden-buttered sugar cookie and cozy cinnamon, making me wonder if Snickerdoodle Kookies are actually a prototyped missing link between Cinnamon and Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch…”

Truly the most rousing of 2018’s many sleeper cereal hits, this unique holiday cereal came from one of the most unexpected store brands: Aldi-exclusive Millville. As the first true snickerdoodle cereal, the Kookies nevertheless did the cinnamon cookie classic right, and I firmly believe it’s better than what the high name value, low quality control Cookie Crisp brand would’ve done.

This just goes to show me that, much like Stephen King’s Dollar Babies, some sort of authorial and authoritative cereal figure (the FDA? some ex-Ralston CEO? Jerry Seinfeld?) should sell small cereal manufacturers the exclusive rights to rare cereal flavors, just to see what kind of creativity arises. I’d love to see Eggnog Puffins!

Though ultimately, much like these discs (that out-butter Cinnamon Toast Crunch), it may be impossible to separate a cereal company from big business. After all, these Kookies threw me down the deepest research hole I spelunked all year.

3. Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries Slurpee

“…the kind of weird, pretty niche, and definitely pupil-dilatingly supercharged blüberberry flavor hits all the right notes for fans of intelligently modernized nostalgia like me.”

Doubtlessly my most controversial inclusion on this list, the Cap’n’s cereal-adjacent slush made many headlines for its outlandish concept—syruped ice…flavored like cereal and milk? that’s exponentially unnatural!—and its divisive reception. Some, like me, lauded it for almost flawlessly re-creating the taste of Cap’n Crunch Berries Cereal, while others saw the beverage as so abhorrent that its mere existence sickeningly surpassed witchcraft’s millennia of hysteria provocation.

But hey: it turns your tongue blue! And it’s exactly the type of boundary pushing the cereal aisle is often missing. So while the Cap’n forges even newer and wackier cereal frontiers, I at least believe his nautical nectar deserves a place in cereal history.

Even if it’s just a footnote on my eventual cereal warlockism trial.

2. Malt-O-Meal & Cold Stone Creamery Our Strawberry Blonde Cereal

“…while no pieces in Our Strawberry Blonde can really live alone, they’re wonderful together. The earthen-sweet graham squares and the berries-n-cream-inducing marshmallows work together to tame the strawberry sea before them.”

2019 is already promising several ground-breaking cereal partnerships, like the aforementioned snack kids and snack cakes. But 2018 really kicked off that tactical team-up trend when Malt-O-Meal—already dubbed a dark horse power player after the underground critical success of 2017’s French Toasters*—launched an I-Scream-ically surprising venture with Cold Stone Creamery.

While the consonant-sandwiching comrades’ more ambitious recipe was a touch underwhelming, MOM & CBC really perfected an otherwise unseen combo: strawberry and graham (with marshmallow playing generically saccharine safety, as always).

The trio of flakes, puffs, and marbits ended up as a memorable cult favorite in my pantry. Let’s just say the 2-pound bag’s resealable flap was Zip’d far more often than Loc’d.

*I didn’t even find French Toasters in my stores to review until this year. I mention this here mostly for the sake of dramatic transition. For if French Toasters were a 2018 cereal, they’d doubtlessly be on this list, having earned only one of two 10/10 ratings (for a true cereal) all year. The other perfect score? It belongs to:

1. Malt-O-Meal Double Chocolate Brownie Crunch

“…this cereal feels illegally chocolatey. It’s like every chocolate biscuit and iced wafer you’ve ever eaten—plus a couple Oreo wafers—decided to merge their essences into a single orb of delicious choco-instrumentality.”

This really was Malt-O-Meal’s year of cereal superstardom. Bouncing back from a rockier first two years under Post’s ownership, the company seems set on a baffling, yet beautiful new business strategy: release slight creative derivations of more famous cereals, and (this is only a prediction) use the money you’re saving by not advertising to make the cereals actually really good.

Case in point: Double Chocolate Brownie Crunch. My review sells my fanatic feelings on it pretty clearly. The stuff is what retro Count Chocula tasted like before General Mills shucked his budget, replacing savory and dense oat flour with corn. Modern day Count Chocula is a husk of his former self, and the fudgy puffs of CBC may very well be his spherical soul.

So while the Count and Co. aim for the cinema, Double Chocolate Brownie Crunch will be filling the scarily good void he left behind.

That’s my list and I’m stickin’ to it. Feel free to share your own favorites in the comments, as well as what new goodies you’re looking forward to foraging for in 2019.

And a big thank you, as always, for reading and supporting the site. Times like now are a bit more time-consuming to keep up with, but the vocal camaraderie surrounding this blog always make it worth it. Wishing you a sweet and never soggy 2019.