The Best Popular Breakfast Cereal Isn't Cheerios Or Cinnamon Toast Crunch

Froot Loops just pulled off the cereal upset no one saw coming. In Daily Meal's ranking of 16 popular cereals, it went up against every box in the aisle — including heavy-hitters like Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Lucky Charms — and somehow came out on top. It's the kind of pick that feels unserious at first, until you look closer at how it actually performed: solid fruity flavor, no weird aftertaste, holds its crunch, and doesn't turn your milk into liquid sugar sludge. That alone puts it ahead of half the shelf.

Each cereal was judged on taste, nutritional balance, and whether it could survive milk without collapsing into paste. Froot Loops had the best ratio of fun to function — sweet, but not overwhelming, and weirdly clean-tasting for a rainbow-colored cereal with 12 grams of sugar per serving.

It ended up being a crash course in popular breakfast cereals through the decades — with old-school staples and newer, "better for you" picks side by side. But even the best of the '80s breakfast cereals couldn't touch this one on the rankings. Froot Loops didn't win on nostalgia. It won because it was actually better.

Froot Loops has long been treated like a side character in the cereal aisle — familiar, colorful, and maybe a little dated. But for a brand that launched in 1963 with only three colors in the box, its staying power is hard to ignore. Toucan Sam got a glow-up in the '90s when blue, green, and purple loops joined the mix, and he's been on the front of the box ever since, cartoonishly sniffing out cereal with the same line every time: "Follow your nose!" Say what you will, it clearly worked.

And people do care. Scroll through Reddit and you'll find everything from decade-late love letters to chaotic photo spreads of users separating every single loop by color. One post compared the nostalgia rush of tasting it again to that Ratatouille flashback scene. Another described a days-long spiral of eating it every morning like some kind of sugar-fueled possession. You don't get that kind of reaction without some serious emotional imprint.

It doesn't hurt that Froot Loops is also one of the top-selling cereals in the U.S., moving nearly 92 million boxes a year. There are healthier cereal alternatives that are just as good — but few have managed to pull off the same mix of chaos, crunch, and brand loyalty. Froot Loops didn't need a comeback. It never left.