Captain Crunch Shenanigans

Cap'n Crunch was my favorite cereal when I was a kid. It still is, though I don't eat it very often these days, being a fat old guy who's trying somewhat successfully to shed some pounds.

And then I found Cap'n Crunch's Crunch Treasures. The front of the box promises that Crunch Treasures has "1/2 the sugar of regular Cap' Crunch." Sounds good, right? A lot of the flavor in Cap'n Crunch comes from brown sugar, so I figured that maybe Quaker cut back on the regular sugar - maybe replaced it with Splenda or something - to cut the sugar.

Ha. Maybe not. Lynnafred and I compared the Nutrition Facts on a box of regular Cap'n Crunch with those on a box of Crunch Treasures, and what we found was pretty surprising:

By boldly announcing on the front of the box that Treasures contains half the sugar of regular Cap'n Crunch, Quaker is trying to make the consumer believe that Treasures is somehow better for you than regular Cap'n Crunch - as if that's possible with sugar-bombs like the Cap'n Crunch family of junk food.

Read down the labels with me: Per serving, Treasures actually has more calories than regular Crunch (120 vs. 110.) Treasures is more heavily salted, too - 60mg more sodium. But the biggest surprise is in the carbohydrate load. Treasures really does has half the sugar (6g vs. 12g) but astonishingly it has almost double the "other carbohydrates!" The end result is that Cap'n Crunch's Crunch Treasures has 26g of carbs compared to the original's 23g. Half the sugar, yes, but the carb total is what really counts.

So, Quaker is totally full of shit with their marketing here. Also, notice that the "$1.00 Pack" in the photo above contains 4 servings and 3.9 ounces of Crunch Treasures, while the original Cap'n Crunch contains 6 servings and 5.5 ounces at the same price. All this does is blur the nutritional understanding for most customers. Using the raw numbers, we find that per ounce, these two cereals are just about the same, with Original delivering 25g of carbs per ounce and Treasures about 27g. Now, if your unit of measurement is "1 box," you start to see a difference, due mostly to the difference in weight between the two: the Original Cap'n Crunch would deliver 138g of total carbohydrates if you at the whole damn box, whereas the Crunch Treasures holds 104g. Whew. Maths are hard, my head is going to asplode.

The Important Part - How Does It Taste?

Okay, but to hell with all that carb counting and sugar auditing shit, this is CAP'N FRIGGIN' CRUNCH we're talking about and the only metric that matters is how it tastes when we OM NOM NOM. How does it taste? In a word, crappy. Treasures has just a hint of Crunch's delicious brown sugar bouquet when it's chomped dry right out of the box. But Cap'n Crunch is meant to be eaten in milk, and Crunch Treasures completely fails here. The sweet tastes is totally overwhelmed and washed away by the milk, leaving it tasting a little like millet-flavored cardboard. And in a further betrayal of the Cap'n Crunch promise (Stays crunchy even in milk!) the stuff gets soggy fast.

The verdict: A soggy and solid "Meh." Don't waste your money. If you're going to blow your cash and your healthy blood glucose levels, you might as well go all out and enjoy the company of original Cap'n Crunch. Crunch Treasures are worthless.