The Fast Food Chain That Tried To Make Its Own Cereal Back In The '80s

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We've ranked the unhealthiest drinks from Dunkin', but the fast food giant formerly known as Dunkin' Donuts is about more than just sugar-bomb coffee confections ... in 1988, it was also behind a sugar-bomb breakfast cereal. On the lengthy list of discontinued '80s cereals is the presumably delicious, if unimaginatively named, Dunkin' Donuts Cereal. It came in two flavors: glazed (vanilla) and chocolate. If you didn't want to make the pilgrimage to Dunkin' for some fresh-baked donuts for breakfast, you could indulge in this cereal, which was inspired by some of the famous DD offerings. The cereal, like so many others, came in three fun shapes: loops inspired by donuts, balls inspired by Munchkins, and figure-eights that arguably had nothing to do with Dunkin' but looked cool anyway.

Ralston, the cereal company that partnered with Dunkin' to make the donut cereal, was a big name in '80s IP tie-in cereals, including breakfast fare based on properties like Barbie, Cabbage Patch Kids, Batman, Gremlins, and even Steve Urkel from the hit sitcom, "Family Matters." What all these cereals had in common were fun shapes and colors, as well as enough sugar to make Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the uptight health nut behind Corn Flakes cereal's strange, Puritanical origin story, weep tears of frustration. Dunkin' Donuts cereal was no exception. The companies went all-in on advertising, with a line of commercials featuring iconic DD character "Fred the Baker," but it was to no avail. Dunkin' Donuts Cereal only lasted a year before it was ingloriously yanked from shelves.

According to former '80s kids, Dunkin' Donuts Cereal had a lot to recommend it. "The chocolate flavored donut cereal was where it's at," one YouTube commenter remarked dreamily. "I so remember those... I begged my grandparents to buy them for me as a kid," a Facebook user reminisced, setting off a chain of comments riffing on the idea of chocolate donut cereal and how ludicrous/amazing that was. "I loved the chocolate one," a Redditor stated. "Only cereal that came close to [the] taste of it was Oreo-Os." It's worth noting that the idea of crunchy, donut-ty breakfast isn't unheard of today; as of this writing, cereal giant Kellogg's was offering Frosted Flakes Glazed Donut Holes cereal, along with Krave Glazed Donut Holes Cereal. 

While we can't find an official explanation for why Dunkin' Donuts Cereal got the ax, a few things come to mind. First of all, looking at Ralston's stable alone, the 1980s were packed bumper-to-bumper with new cereals, so competition was stiff. Almost all failed to survive the '90s — at the very latest! — so it's likely that the Dunkin' cereal, like many of its peers, just got outsold. Also, while parents of the 1980s were largely not as concerned about excessive sugar as those today, the very idea of a pastry-inspired cereal is egregiously unhealthy. It's just a hypothesis, of course, but perhaps many parents didn't want their kids eating donut cereal. No matter what the reason, Dunkin' Donuts Cereal now remains only in memories.