Girl Scouts Thin Mint Breakfast Cereal: A Fresh and Restrained Start to the Day

Divergence
Let's get one thing straight from the beginning: Girl Scouts Thin Mint cereal is not just a bunch of miniature Girl Scout cookies waiting to be soaked in milk, nor would we wish them to be.  It's easy enough to eat cookies for breakfast if that's what we want to do.  Nonetheless, there's not as much setting them apart nutritionally as we'd like to believe.  Gram for gram, their respective carbohydrate and refined sugar contents are nearly identical.  When you factor in the lactose sugars naturally present in milk, it's increasingly clear that most breakfast cereals don't provide the balanced nutrition and steady, consistent food energy that we've long thought.

But the Food Kingdom has never been, nor shall ever be, a nutrition blog, nor a platform from which to lecture on healthy living.  So our focus shall rightly be, assuming we're fine with powering up on simple carbs for breakfast, how do these nuggets of cocoa-infused mintiness taste?  Well, they actually bear an impressive resemblance to the original thin mint cookies and they accomplish this task with a surprisingly restrained sweetness, which is ironic considering their previously-mentioned high sugar content.

If this cereal flies off the shelves, it won't be on account of imaginative packaging.  The box looks like it was created by a first-year graphic design student during a General Mills summer internship.

Of Food Architecture and Technology

During the product-design phase, General Mills's food scientists must have struggled with how faithful to be to the "Thin Mint" concept, and whether to size each cereal piece to scale.  If they were to replicate the proportions of an actual Thin Mint wafer, the resulting cereal unit would either be impossibly wide, never able to fit more than two-at-a-time on even a large spoon, or impossibly thin and liable to go immediately limp and pliable upon contact with milk.  Necessarily then, the shape of the cereal piece would have to be more puck-shaped than wafer-shaped.  The end result feels disconcertingly large in the mouth and more aggressively crunchy than delicately crisp.

The next challenge to address would have been how the chocolate-mint flavor should be transmitted to the cereal.  The most obvious choice, to bake the chocolate mint flavor right into the cereal, was the route not taken, probably because of the high cost that using that much cocoa would entail, and perhaps because baking chocolate right into the cereal "dough" would convey a complete lack of nutritional concern.  And so the chocolate-mint flavor is applied to the surface of the cereal as a sort of impermeable lacquer coating.  This choice turns out to be wise for two reasons.  First, it ensures that the tongue consistently makes contact with a resolutely chocolatey surface in every bite; at no point is the chocolate mint flavor not being transmitted directly to the taste buds.  Equally important, this chocolate-mint lacquer is an impressive moisture barrier, preventing milk from seeping into the porous foundational substrate of ground corn before the cereal piece is completely pulverized.

"Enlarged to show texture," as the caption on the box says.  Here see the tar-like resin of dark chocolate and cool mint adhering resolutely to the robust disks of cornmeal. If they remind you a bit of Spree candy in their shape, you're on to something.  They feel that way in the mouth too. You wonder, as you bite down, if they're just a bit too big and and a bit too crunchy for comfort.

The best way to appreciate the daunting size of stout cocoa kibbles it to compare them to Cheerios.  I measured their diameter as 46% wider than those toasted oat rings, and they're a good deal thicker too.  Add to that the fact they have no hole in the middle and they have at least double the mass of their General Mills teammate.

It's All About the Flavor

We could go on a good deal longer about the intricacies of Thin Mint cereal's texture and mouthfeel, about its longevity in milk, and much more.  But, as with any adaptation of a culinary classic, what we really want to know about is its fidelity to that model.  Does the product capture the magic essence of the food it imitates?  The bottom line is that Thin Mint cereal absolutely does that, uncannily well.  If you close your eyes and roll a piece around on your tongue, it's very much like tasting the cookie.  The cornmeal flavor will reveal itself in the aftertaste of a carefully scrutinized single piece, but of course this is not how we will actually be eating these.  Rather we'll be inhaling spoonful after spoonful and savoring the cool, moderately sweet, and rather subtle and adult combination of creamy milk, rich chocolate, and refreshing mint.  There are surely myriad worse ways to start the day.

Here at the Food Kingdom, we do not succumb to the deceptive manipulations of food styling, and so you are not seeing opaque glue intermingling with the cereal, but real whole milk, which is considerably more translucent.   Note how the milk glides along the surface, repelled by the shield of chocolate lacquer.

Conclusions
Commercials for this kind of product often advise "enjoy as part of a balanced diet" and we dismiss that as so much ass-covering, liability-shielding, corporate doublespeak.  But whatever one thinks of the motives behind such counsel, it happens to be sound.  We would not advise that this become your Monday to Friday morning staple, but if a grown adult has Grape Nuts and berries on Monday, oatmeal and apples on Tuesday, egg whites on a whole-grain muffin and turkey bacon on Wednesday, and plain yogurt with fruit and chopped nuts on Thursday, then why on earth can't they have Girl Scout cookies for breakfast on Friday?  Oh, reason not the need, and enjoy yourself.  Have some chocolate!

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