After cupboards full of grainy, earthy type, paper-bagged cereals taking up precious room and making me look like a farmer who possibly gives a shit, I decided that it was about high time for a proper, nutritious breakfast. Something with bags of sugar so I can run amok for an hour afterward and then slump in a corner, crashed out and useless for the rest of the day. So during my irregular trips to Tesco, I stopped and scanned the colourful part of the cereal aisle.

My go-to choice is, and will always be, Coco Pops. The old adage ‘I’d rather have a bowl of Coco Pops’ never rang truer after my time with Krave cereal. In fact, I’d rather have a bowl of crushing debt, court ordered repayments, and hourly personal bear attacks than another bowl of Krave.

I had seen the commercials before. The marketing team trying their hardest to show everyone that Krave cereal is some sort of badass mofo in the cereal world. Toasted pillows of golden crunch, filled with chocolate, and all for the first meal of the day – on paper, it sounds utterly glorious and yes, even badass.
I grabbed the box, forgot everything else I had needed to buy, and then ran home excited for what the morning would bring.

I tore open the brash box and poured the contents into a bowl. After I had splashed some milk into the mix, I realised I had forgotten a spoon, so off I popped to get one. When I came back and shoveled the cereal in my mouth, the toasted coating had turned to slime; a disgusting film of gunk was forming around the golden parcels quicker than lightspeed as everything rapidly dissolved. The milk had only been paired with the cereal for about 4 seconds before I sampled it. It was how I imagine eating algae and phlegm would be like, texture-wise. In fact, that’s not far off what it tasted like, too.

As I squashed through the now soggy outer coating, the chocolate filling entered my life with an insulting bombardment of salt. The initial pang that hit me caused me to panic, thinking I had chomped down on a drowned rat carcass that had made its way into my bowl. Same effect with the second mouthful, and third, and fourth…

I just didn’t, and still don’t, understand what Krave was/is trying to do here. It’s advertising itself as a hazelnut chocolate-filled toasted cereal but tasted like a tramp’s salted snot.

With only a few mouthfuls left, dehydration had set into the point of having to pour jugs of water into my eyes. I felt as if this cereal was trying to kill me by drying me out, and it very nearly did.