Lifelong Quests! Lawsuits! Feuds! A Super-Serious Story About Cereal.

Throughout cereal’s long life, there have been two constants: change and conflict. Photos by Salvador Ochoa 

Whenever Gabe Fonseca invites someone over to his Los Angeles apartment for the first time, he worries what they’ll think of his cereal box collection. He has over 200 on display in one small room, affixed by magnets to sheet metal on the wall. “It’s admittedly weird,” says Fonseca, a 39-year-old TV writer who has worked on shows like Jessica Jones and Private Practice. He cringes imagining negative reactions to the collection: “They’re gonna be like, ‘This dude is weird.’” But despite Fonseca’s anxiety, most visitors dive right into the nostalgia. “People go in and they [say], ‘Oh, you collect cereal boxes?’ And then they’ll be like, ‘Oh, I remember that one,’ or ‘Do you have that one?’”

Fonseca’s collection spans the past four decades of cereal, showcasing the creativity of graphic design and cereal engineering, while telling a history of American popular culture. Many are named for hit TV shows, music or films of the day. There’s a box of Urkel-Os next to Strawberry Shortcake. A New Kids on the Block cereal box floats atop Donkey Kong Junior cereal and Jurassic Park Crunch: The Lost World. The classics are here too: Froot Loops, Lucky Charms, Cap’n Crunch and more.

Gabe Fonseca arranges some of the 200 cereal boxes, which are affixed by magnets to sheet metal and on display in his Los Angeles apartment.

Fonseca began collecting cereal boxes about 10 years ago, amassing hundreds of them, which were soon piling up inside his home. “My wife was like, ‘This is ridiculous. You need to open these and flatten them and store them somewhere else,’” he recalls. She also suggested that he start a YouTube channel, as a way to preserve and document boxes for posterity before throwing them out.

So in 2014, Fonseca launched Cereal Time TV. In videos posted every Saturday morning (a nod to the iconic TV time slot when kids watched cartoons while eating sugary cereals), Fonseca talks and reviews cereal. He covers classics and new ones, as well as diving deep into the breakfast food’s history. An episode about Hostess Donettes cereal, for example, covered donut-shaped cereals of the past (Fonseca prefers powdered Donutz cereal from the late 1980s). With 250-plus episodes, Cereal Time TV has amassed more than 8 million views.

Fonseca is a part of a (mostly male) online community that obsesses over cereal. They dissect the taste of the newest Cap’n Crunch variety with the precision of Ruth Reichl rating a gourmet meal, and analyze the box of a classic movie-tie-in cereal with the enthusiasm of a highbrow art critic.

Dan Goubert, 23, another cereal enthusiast, says his fixation began when he was young, but it has always been about more than just the cereal. One day when Goubert was about 7 years old, he bounded down his family’s basement stairs, looking for a computer game to play. Among the games in his parents’ collection, he discovered the curiously named Chex Quest, which came free in Chex boxes in the late 1990s. A kid-friendly twist on the classic first-person shooter Doom , the game’s main character wore armor made of Chex cereal. His arms and legs poked out of the rice squares, and he defeated his enemies by teleporting them back to their home planets (instead of killing them).

“It’s just a really good example of how cereal can grow into something more,” says Goubert. “I was always infatuated with it, and I still am.”

Although Goubert wasn’t born until the late 1990s, he credits “the coolness of ’90s retro commercials” with fueling the creation of his blog Cerealously.net, where he reviews cereals and Pop-Tarts, as well as reports on the latest cereal news. More recently Goubert has started co-hosting The Empty Bowl, a “meditative podcast on cereal.” Goubert says the ritual of eating a bowl of cereal — “the scientific balance [of] the milk in the cereal consistency, and the clanking of the spoon on the bowl” — can be an exercise in thinking deeply, even for non-cereal-obsessives. The Empty Bowl has a devoted following, including Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who praised the podcast on Twitter, while the Cerealously blog has garnered mentions in Forbes and amassed more than 17,000 followers on Instagram.

Like Goubert, Thomas Hicks, a 30-year-old actor and model, says he embraced a love of cereal at a young age and has been obsessed with it his whole life. He says he used to stash boxes of Froot Loops and Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries in his closet to keep his siblings from eating them. He recalls waking up in the middle of the night, too excited about his morning bowl of cereal to sleep. Hicks’s YouTube channel, Cereal Snob, has over 3,000 subscribers, and the most popular video has more than 85,000 views. His approach is different than Goubert’s — he doesn’t focus on packaging, branding or underlying philosophical implications – he critiques the cereal itself. And while Fonseca basically likes every cereal he reviews, Hicks is more critical. He believes that the perfect cereal has yet to be created.

Thomas Hicks showing off his Froot Loops socks in front of the cereal aisle at the local supermarket in Los Angeles. Photo courtesy Thomas Hicks

Even as he lists his favorites, Hicks can’t help noting their flaws. Crunch Berries falls short because “it hurts you … it’s the shape of the pieces, and they’re coarser around the edges.” Golden Grahams and Fruity Pebbles “get soggy too fast.” And Lucky Charms “wouldn’t be edible without marshmallows.”

“I just think really highly [of cereals]. And most of them don’t stack up,” says Hicks. While his reviews can be harsh, Hicks claims they come from a place of love. “When I see a new cereal, I want it to be better than the ones I’ve had before,” he says. “It doesn’t always happen.”

Despite their different approaches, all three men exude an infectious joy for their favorite breakfast food — and they have formed connections over this shared bond. When Goubert gets the scoop on a new cereal, he’ll text Fonseca, who will text Hicks. Fonseca hopes one day he’ll be able to cast Hicks in a TV series (and yes, he does try to craft cereal scenes in the shows he currently writes for).

“There didn’t feel like there was ever any, any competition,” between the three of them, Fonseca says. “We all kind of have the same love of cereal.”

But the world of cereal connoisseurs hasn’t always been so congenial.

Throughout cereal’s long life, there have been two constants: change and conflict. Invented in 1863 by James Caleb Jackson, an enterprising doctor, cereal was originally a health food. Jackson’s wheat flour–based Granula was a far cry from today’s sugar-laden favorites. It was bland, boring and so difficult to chew that you had to soak it in milk overnight to make it edible.

It took another doctor to turn cereal into an iconic mass-produced food: John Harvey Kellogg. Kellogg’s first cereal was a Granula knockoff — it even had the same name. Jackson sued, and Kellogg changed his to “Granola.” But it wasn’t until Kellogg and his younger brother Will developed an easily digestible, bland breakfast food called Corn Flakes that they really put cereal on the map. Dr. Kellogg championed bland foods, at least in part because he thought a simple diet could help prevent masturbation. So when Will added sugar to Corn Flakes and began selling his sweeter version to the public in 1906, it kicked off a decades-long feud filled with lawsuits, accusations of stolen recipes, and public acrimony that divided the Kellogg family.

An advertisement for Kellogg's Toasted Corn Flakes featuring “The Sweetheart of the Corn,” circa 1910. (Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Still, supersweet cereals didn’t become especially popular until Post debuted its sugar-coated puffed rice cereal, aptly named Sugar Crisp, in 1949. The ensuing sugar cereal craze of the 1950s saw the introduction of Sugar Krinkles and Sugar Smiles, as well as now-iconic cereals like Sugar Corn Pops, Sugar Frosted Flakes and Sugar Smacks (all have since dropped “sugar” from their names).

The introduction of television into the American home brought commercials with animated cereal mascots. The Trix Rabbit debuted in 1959, followed soon after by Cap’n Crunch with its naval-captain mascot Horatio M. Crunch, and Lucky Charms with the ginger-haired Lucky the Leprechaun. Toys and prizes inside cereal boxes, such as baking soda–powered atomic submarines and Star Trek badges, also became more prevalent around this time (although Will Kellogg is credited with inventing the concept back in 1909).

A couple of decades later, when baby boomers felt the pull of nostalgia and birthed the collectors-market boom for comic books and toys from their childhoods, some craved the ephemera of classic cereals, and the rarity of 1950s and ’60s boxes made them valuable collectors items.

According to Dan Goodsell, founder of Welcome (an online chronicle of the history of cereal) and co-author of the book Krazy Kids’ Food!, the heyday of the cereal-collecting market was in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

Goodsell says his own cereal lust began young. He’d tag along with his mom to get groceries, so that he could select that week’s buy. “I always had a sort of collector nature, even as a kid going to the grocery store. I always looked at it as an adventure,” he says. “I have a very intense collector nature in my DNA.”

As an adult, Goodsell began searching for cereal boxes from his childhood, the ones he remembered from Saturday morning commercials in the late ’60s and early ’70s. He considers original cereal collectors like himself to be “next-level collectors,” a different breed than those that were riffling through bins at flea markets for Incredible Hulk comics or trading with other collectors for a Man from U.N.C.L.E. gun still in the box. Instead, he was on the hunt for the absurdly hard to find.

“A lot of stuff that you’re looking for, you will only get one shot during your lifetime to buy,” Goodsell says. “If you want a Fruity Freakies box” — a childhood favorite of his introduced in 1975 — “there’s three of them out there probably … so if you want to get one of those, you’re gonna have to pry it out of the hands of one of those three people, and good luck with that.”

This was the pre-internet era, when enthusiasts would eagerly anticipate the arrival of Toy Shop, the toy collector’s bible. The biweekly magazine was one of the few ways to get information on the pricing and availability of everything from Barbies to Hot Wheels, and it also ran sales listings and wanted ads. There were ads for subscription newsletters and zines too — the analog version of eBay crossed with a blog. It wasn’t long before Toy Shop began listing all of the available vintage cereal boxes on the market.

Aside from Goodsell, there are two other big names from that first generation of serious cereal collectors: Duane Dimock and Scott Bruce. And there was no love lost between Dimock and Bruce. “Scott and Duane never got along with each other,” says Goodsell. “[They] feuded in the day.”

Vintage cereal boxes, part of Fonseca’s collection.

Dimock, now 62, claims that he was the first person to collect cereal boxes as a category. “There were a few people collecting cereal boxes,” he explains, “but … they were collecting Batman cereal to complete their Batman collection.”

He started collecting in 1987, going to swap meets in the L.A. area to buy cereal boxes, mostly ones from the 1960s like Quisp and Quake. It wasn’t long before he’d amassed hundreds of boxes and was known as the collector. Today, Dimock’s most prized possessions include some of the earliest U.S. cereal boxes, including an early Kellogg’s cereal and Jackson’s Granula from 1869.

“Duane probably was the absolute original guy,” says Goodsell. Bruce (who declined to comment for this article), meanwhile, had been a driving force behind the lunch box collectors market. He’d started a zine called Hot Boxing, which helped build interest in vintage Barbie and Yogi Bear lunch boxes — and, depending on who you talk to, drove up the prices. In January of 1990, he wanted to do the same for old boxes of Sugar Pops and Frosted Flakes. That’s when he sent a letter to Dimock, asking for his opinion on the best boxes to feature in his new zine, Flake. He signed the letter “Mr. Cereal Box.”

Dimock was incensed. He says Bruce had called him a few months earlier, asking about the state of the cereal box market and discussing their shared interest in collecting. “All during the conversation, he never mentioned he was going to do a fanzine,” Dimock says. “He just wanted to buy because he liked cereal boxes.” Dimock was outraged that now Bruce was trying to turn his passion into a business opportunity, and in the process would likely drive up prices.

Dimock never replied to Bruce’s letter. Instead, he started plotting. “I suggested to a cereal collector friend, [that] we make fun of this guy and expose what he clearly was trying to hide,” says Dimock. So, he got to work on Snot Boxing, a parody of Scott’s lunch box zine, and sketched out the cover for a parody of Flake, which he called FAKE.

Cover of the zine “Fake,” a parody of “Flake,” sketched by Duane Dimock. Photo courtesy Duane Dimock

Flake premiered in February, and just a few months later Dimock’s ad for Snot Boxing ran in Toy Shop. “Steve Bob’s Snot Boxing Fanzine,” it read, with this description: “a parody (or real) look at a lunch box fanzine.” There was also a line teasing the release of FAKE. 

Not long afterward, Dimock received a letter from Bruce, written on Kellogg’s Corn Flakes stationery. “After all parody is the sincerest form of flattery,” it read. “Send me a copy of both ‘Snot Boxing’ (I love it) and ‘FAKE.’” The letter ended with “P.S. You’re a sub-genius.”

The feud was on.

Dimock did send a copy of Snot Boxing to Bruce, and soon after, he got a phone call from a lawyer named Beverly Kogut — who he later learned was Scott Bruce’s wife. She claimed that the zine constituted “unlawful defamation” and demanded he cease publishing it and send an apology to everyone who had subscribed. She threatened him with a lawsuit and said that he would have his “lunchbox collection taken away.” Duane says he laughed. “You mean my cereal box collection?” he replied.

Kogut followed up with a letter threatening litigation and warning Dimock not to bring any of his parody zines to an upcoming collectibles show in Dallas . She included a draft of an apology for Dimock to send to his subscribers, for “any injury to the good reputations and good names of Scott Bruce, his wife, and any of Scott Bruce’s publications.”

Around this time, another of Dimock’s ads for FAKE appeared in Toy Shop. By coincidence, it was just below an ad for Bruce’s Flake. Kogut faxed a letter to Toy Shop demanding that they “screen all ads in the lunch box and cereal sections … for statements or pictures which defame or advertise publications which defame Mr. Bruce, his wife, or his lunch box and cereal box businesses.”

In July of 1990, Dimock went to the collectibles show in Dallas. He’d paid for a table and arrived with not only copies and covers of his Bruce-mocking zines but also a flyer with a caricature of Scott Bruce on it. The cartoon Bruce, identified as “Steve ‘Pailhead’ Bob™,” had red beady eyes, spiky hair and a “kick me” sign affixed to his shirt.

As he handed out his flyers, Dimock wondered how Bruce would react. Would he yell at him? Hit him? He soon found out. As Dimock walked back to his table, he saw Bruce there examining his stuff. “I come up to his side and said, ‘Scott … my pal,’” Dimock recalls. “I was impressed, he did the smartest thing he could had done; he meekly walked away … saying nothing.”

It’s unclear if Bruce actually had a hand in pumping up the prices of vintage cereal boxes by publishing Flake. Some sought-after boxes were still hovering in the usual price range (about $200) after Bruce came on the scene, but others had started to sell for much more. In one issue of Flake, Bruce claimed that a 1983 box of Sugar Smacks had sold for $5,000.

Bruce and his wife never did sue Dimock, who never actually published the first issue of FAKE, despite having made a satirical cover with Bruce’s face on a box of “Steve Bob’s Self-Butter Crunch.” Bruce continued to publish Flake for at least three more years. Both he and Dimock continued to collect cereal boxes. Dimock refused to sell any of his boxes to Bruce, and almost 30 years later, there’s still animosity in Dimock’s voice when he talks about Bruce.

“Taste and smell are really strong memory inducers,” Fonseca says. “When eating a bowl of Fruity Pebbles or eating a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, you can really be transported back to that time when you’re a kid … a simpler time when … we didn’t have any responsibilities.” And while most people are satisfied with the euphoria of simply tasting a cereal from their childhood, others want more. “There are the crazy people like me,” explains Goodsell, “who get so buried in nostalgia, they want to own stuff and have it in their house.” Or publish fanzines, create websites and blogs, make YouTube videos and podcasts … even lash out at someone they see as trying to muscle in on and profit from their passion.

Nostalgic obsession can take on many forms. For Fonseca, the most extreme form of his obsession was the hunt for a lost cereal: Buñuelitos. Initially released by General Mills in U.S. Spanish-language markets, it was a honey and cinnamon flavored corn puff cereal. Fonseca loved it, but he hadn’t been able to find a box for more than two decades. Buñuelitos became his white whale.

Then, a few years ago, he was visiting a friend in Minnesota. It was the closest he’d ever been to the suburban Minneapolis headquarters of General Mills. The company follows Fonseca’s YouTube channel, Cereal Time TV, and sends him boxes from time to time, so he reached out and was invited to the corporate archives. Fonseca was like a kid in a candy store. “Oh, my God, this is amazing,” he enthused, as archivists showed him cereal memorabilia they thought he would like. There were dozens of old boxes, classic cereal prizes, and even original animation cells from a few commercials.

Before Fonseca left, they gave him something to take home: a small snack pack of his beloved Buñuelitos.

But cereal companies aren’t just using nostalgia to build bridges with online cereal influencers. It’s become big business. Like TV and film studios, the cereal world constantly revives and reboots hits from the 1980s and ’90s, from Garbage Pail Kids Cereal (with marshmallow “barf bites”) to the recent relaunches of Oreo O’s and Pop-Tarts cereal.

That pull of the past can also create problems, especially when it bumps up against the push toward the future. Cereal is always changing, like when General Mills removed the high-fructose corn syrup and artificial colors from Trix in 2016. Red 40, Blue 1 and Yellow 6 were replaced by colors derived from purple carrots, radishes and turmeric. Fonseca thought it was a bad move. “They looked really pale and bland,” he says. “I think that was a little off-putting to people who expect Trix to be these brightly colored … shapes and pieces.”

Fonseca, left, and Hicks at Gizmo’s Cereal Bar in Los Angeles. Photo courtesy Thomas Hicks

Goubert agreed. “Eating muted, artificial color-free Trix makes my inner flame of childhood glow a little dimmer,” he wrote on Cerealously.

Trix fans revolted, with some saying it was now basically “a salad.”

Hicks wasn’t surprised by the reaction. “I fully support people who are against artificial flavors, but I don’t think you should do it with cereal,” he explains. “Lots of my fans … want to have the cereal they ate as kids.”

In the end, General Mills kept the new, healthier Trix, but also released a “classic” version to appease those clamoring for them to bring back the artificial flavor and coloring.

Nostalgia drives people’s cereal love, as they aim to return to the “moments of happiness” and innocence of their childhood. What drew most enthusiasts to cereal in the first place was the novelty: the many variations of Cheerios, from Honey Nut to Apple Cinnamon; the inventive cereal shapes, from waffles to four-leaf clovers, cinnamon buns to SpongeBob. The surprise within the box: Which Jungle Book figurine or baking soda–powered submarine would they find?

Fonseca, Goubert and Hicks are in favor of innovation and experimentation, found in cereals like Post’s Sour Patch Kids or Honey Bunches of Oats: Maple Bacon Donuts flavor. Actually, they think the cereal companies haven’t gone far enough. Goubert wants them to explore more nuances within the taste palate. “There’s all kinds of layers to donut cereals,” he says. “There could be a sour-cream donut cereal, or a jelly-filled donut cereal.” Fonseca thinks the “miniature breakfast food” genre, which has seen its share of toasts, waffles and donuts, is tragically lacking a mini-pancake-shaped cereal. Hicks would like to see a beignet cereal, as well as attempts to harness savory flavors, like a cheesy mashed potato or pot roast cereal — though he admits those “would take cereal scientists a lot of work.”

Fonseca recording and editing one of his videos for his YouTube channel.

Despite their wish lists, today’s cereal connoisseurs are noticeably positive. There are no heated disagreements or feuds. “Maybe it’s from the marketing we grew up with back in the day,” Goubert jokes. “All these mascots and the fun commercials.” In fact, the biggest conflict within the group is Fonseca and Goubert’s long-running debate about whether Krave is a good cereal. Fonseca considers it a knockoff of the mid-’90s cereal Hidden Treasures, which he describes lovingly as “golden pillows that were filled with fruity … frosting.” It has, to his mind, set a benchmark that no other pillowed cereal — including Krave — has lived up to.

“It might be like a cilantro-style thing,” Goubert says, “where some people are just born with a genetic disposition to think [Krave] tastes like dog food.” His own love of Krave, as he writes on Cerealously, comes from “the unique blend of multigrain and graham flavor in every biscuit: it’s like someone melted Teddy Grahams, graham crackers, Nilla Wafers, and Life Cereal into a single bowl, molded the golden paste into a rounded rectangle, and lovingly slathered a chocolate sliver inside.”

While their blogs and web videos follow in the footsteps of their predecessors’ newsletters and zines, today’s cereal obsessives seem both genial and self-aware.

And their hobby has even gone academic. Dimock now gives lectures on the history of cereal. One product he talks about is Korn-Kinks, from 1890. It was one of the first cereals with a mascot: Kornelia Kinks, a racist caricature of an African-American girl. He cites it as evidence of the way cereal from each era is reflective of the larger American culture at that time, for better or (often) for worse. And in contrast to that particularly ugly example, cereal boxes can show the country’s progress too. A few decades after Korn-Kinks, in 1936, a sprinting Jesse Owens became the first black athlete to have his image emblazoned across the Wheaties box, and today the beaming face of tennis superstar Serena Williams adorns the iconic orange box.

But despite this focus on serious historical issues, even Dimock seems to have mellowed a bit. A few weeks after being interviewed for this story, he sent the writer an email. “Isn’t it funny, how insignificant most everything really is,” he wrote. “I will be interested in you seeing things I can’t see. Good or bad.”

It seems this community of collectors has grown and changed over time … just like cereal.