Raisin Bran Extra is a disappointment

When I saw the commercial for Kellogg's new Raisin Bran Extra cereal during this year’s Super Bowl, I was intrigued. The idea of adding dried cranberries and other stuff to one of my favorite breakfast cereals, Kellogg’s Raisin Bran, sounded delicious.
Like Jerry Seinfeld, I’m sort of a cereal freak. I can eat it for breakfast, lunch or dinner. My other favorites include Quaker’s Life Cereal – Cinnamon, Kellogg’s Corn Pops, General Mills’ Lucky Charms and Reese’s Puffs. Yeah, I’ve got a sweet tooth.
First off, Raisin Bran Extra comes in a tiny box, 14 ounces, probably because some of the new ingredients like cranberries and almond slices are a bit expensive.
After sampling a few bowls of the cereal, I’m underwhelmed. Kellogg’s should have ditched the almond slices and “yogurty clusters” and doubled down on the cranberries. The mix of raisins and cranberries make a tasty combination. The almond slices are so thin and sparse that they’re just there for appearance. And those “yogurty clusters” are a sugary distraction from an otherwise healthy cereal.
Kellogg’s should have come out with “Kellogg’s Raisin Bran With Cranberries” instead. That’s a winning dried fruit combo.
And about those “yogurty clusters,” PepsiCo’s Quaker tried adding those to a version of its Life Cereal called Life Vanilla Yogurt Crunch. It lasted about two years before being discontinued during the summer of 2008. Time to give up on adding “yogurty clusters” to cereal.
Besides, they don’t sound very healthy.
Kellogg’s lists the ingredients of its vanilla-flavored yogurt clusters as: yogurt confectionary coating (sugar, palm kernel and palm oil, nonfat milk powder, reduced mineral whey powder, yogurt powder (cultured whey, nonfat milk) yogurt heat treated after culturing, lactic acid, color added, soy lecithin, artificial color), vanilla crunch (bleached wheat flour, sugar, palm oil, salt, baking soda, artificial flavor and soy lecithin).
That sounds like something Clark Griswold from the Vacation movies might have made. In “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” (1989), Griswold, played by Chevy Chase, boasts about making a new cereal varnish.
When a coworker asks him about it, he says, “Oh, the crunch enhancer? Yeah it’s a non-nutritive cereal varnish. It's semi-permeable. It's not osmotic. What it does is it coats and seals the flake, prevents the milk from penetrating it."
Yummy.