Minions cereal: Tastes wacky, but is kid-approved

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Minion cereal is kid approved

Will picky eaters love Minion cereal as much as the Minions love bananas?

If minions love bananas and kids love minions, will kids love banana flavored minions?

General Mills is hoping fans of the "Despicable Me" franchise will help the brand overcome the trend of slumping cereal sales with the release of its new Minions cereal—a limited edition banana-berry flavored breakfast treat that looks like Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

“Anyone who has watched the movie knows that the minions are crazy about bananas and the team worked really hard to deliver something we think the minions would like,” Kate Gallager, a cereal developer for General Mills told FoxNews.com.

To test out this new breakfast item, Chew on This enlisted the help of Lauren Bloomberg, a food writer and founder of the upcoming KidEatsWorld.com, and her own little Minion fan, son Teddy, aged two-and-a-half. Would General Mills' new cereal pass the test?

We’ve never tasted a food that elicited so many unique replies.

Teddy proudly proclaimed that it tasted like "chicken" and that he loved the vanilla flavor-- (there's no vanilla flavoring in this).

“It tastes like if you made fruit salad into a cereal,” remarked one taster.

“I don’t get too much banana but strawberry flavor is pretty clear,” said another.

“Yup, there’s  definitely a lot of banana in this,” said yet another.

The cereal has the size, shape and texture of Cinnamon Toast Crunch but the taste is a hard-to-place fruit flavor. Despite the range in reactions, most people liked it.

Our one complaint? Little brown minions are supposed to be printed on the squares, but if they were there, they were too small to see.

Teddy continued to munch on the sugared squares after leaving our studios—pretty much the gold standard for any toddler food approval.

And parents might be happy to know that the new Minions cereal has no artificial colors or flavoring (but there are preservatives like BHT and Trisodium Phosphate).  It's part of a larger push by General Mills to switch out artificial dyes and flavorings for natural ones by 2017.

The banana and strawberry flavors are from strawberry juice, raspberry juice and natural banana powder.  But a 3/4 cup serving contains 130 calories and 10 grams of sugar. Compare that to one of Teddy’s current favorites—Cheerios—which has about 100 calories per cup and just 1 gram of sugar.

Bloomberg said she was happy Teddy liked it but wouldn’t serve it for breakfast. “It has a lot of sugar in it, so we would keep this as a snack,” she says.