I got this Nature Valley Cereal for review in the mail quite awhile ago. My excuse for not reviewing it earlier is that there was no milk in the house. That’s a pretty lame excuse, because I’ve actually been snacking on this cereal plain for quite awhile now. It turns out that I’m just plain lazy.

No milk in the fridge is also the reason that all of the pics below show the cereal plain. This is actually good for pictures because when you pour milk into cereal you don’t have too much time before it starts to get soggy. Plus, I can never get the same sort of composition they do with the cereal perfectly dry on top while sitting in milk. Even more difficult: trying to induce the “magic raspberries” to appear in the cereal for their photo op. Those little suckers are hard to convince to come out of hiding… it seems like all the species of Cereal Fruit are nocturnal or something.

But anyhow, this isn’t a photo blog. You want to hear about the cereal. I’ve been seeing a lot more commercials and in-store displays for Nature Valley. They also have the obligatory “Website That Doesn’t Have Our Name In It So It Must Mean We’re Fer Real”. Seems like a big push to promote it is in the works.

There are two flavors currently – Oats ‘N Honey and Cinnamon. I got the former, which is good because I’m not a huge fan of cinnamon flavored cereal. Well – I probably did have Cinnamon Toast Crunch once in awhile.

The big draw for the cereal is supposed to be the granola bar pieces… I’ve had cereal before that had granola in it, but the pieces in here are actually quite substantial. They’re hexagonal shaped and nearly an inch across – the distribution of the pieces is quite good. I got quite a few in each bowl I poured. The ingredients label says the granola pieces contain whole grain oats, rice and honey, among other things.

I was actually going to take some separate close-up pictures of each of the different pieces and then decided that’s overkill. There are three different types of pieces, the granola bar chunk, a rice and oats dominated flake, and a corn dominated flake. The granola is hexagonal as mentioned. The rice and oats flake is pretty puffy and roughly circular in shape. It has a slight sugary glaze on the top. The corn flake is a bit smaller, more elongated and also coated with a sugar glaze.

Tasting these pieces all by themselves and without milk was clearly not intended, but I did that anyway. The granola pieces could easily stand alone as a snack and have a decent brown sugar and honey touch to them. They’re fairly hard and at least three times thicker than the other flakes, but they soften up a bit in milk. The rice pieces are quite puffy as mentioned, but they’ve got harder oat bits nestled within which is sort of hard on the teeth when eating it by itself without milk.

The corn flakes are my least favorite of the three – fairly boring with little crunch. I’d take plain old corn flakes over these any day. But when you eat the cereal as intended, the whole ensemble tastes very good to me. It has a good overall crunch and blend of flavors.

I don’t know too much about sugar content in cereals, but this cereal did have a good amount of sweetness to it. The box says 16g of sugars in a 1 cup serving… if a nutrition specialist (but not a nutritional anthropologist, Alton’s already got that covered on his show) would like to translate that I’d be grateful. Nature Valley cereal is supposed to be a good source of Fiber – there’s that magic word again. The box says 4 g of dietary fiber per 1 cup serving which is supposed to be 15% of Daily Value. Again, I don’t know if that’s good or what. I do know that too much fiber can make yer insides act a little screwy for certain people (see the post on Fiber One Chewy Bars)

One thing I really like about this cereal (and other similar ones) is the pieces are substantial so you can pick them up and eat them right out of the box as a snack. When you have a cereal like Rice Krispies, it’s more difficult to scoop out a handful and eat it like you would chips. Cereal has long been one of my favorite things to eat right out of the box while watching TV. I like this multi-tasking ability of cereal to be a snack or breakfast. I don’t know how much better this is than eating a bag of Doritos – but I’m pretty sure you’ll at least feel better about it.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any price info on the cereal since I got it for free. In general, it seems like cereal has really gotten expensive lately. I’m going to give it a slightly lower score, because I’m assuming this is not going to be a super cheap cereal.

Price: Free (14 oz box, $4.79 MSRP)
Found At: Sent in for review
Cheap Eats Score: 7/10