Aldi's Worst Breakfast Cereal Is A Failed Dupe Of An Iconic Favorite

Nearly every supermarket chain has its own store brand of products, many of which make duplicate versions of popular cereals. Walmart has Great Value, Costco has Kirkland, and Aldi has Millville for its breakfast items. If you're looking for a knock off of Cheerios, Aldi offers up Millville Crispy Oats. This version is significantly cheaper than General Mills Cheerios, and may be priced even lower than comparable store brands. But be warned. Cheaper does not always mean better. Millville Crispy Oats are not worth it at any price.

Aldi makes some pretty tasty dupes of popular brands. Sometimes, anyway. When Tasting Table ranked 15 different Aldi breakfast cereals, Crispy Oats came in dead last. You might think, given how plain Cheerios are to begin with, that it would be difficult to mess up a generic version of them, but Aldi really dropped the ball. They look like Cheerios, but the texture is so light and airy that they dissolve soon after getting wet. That makes it a problem if you plan to eat these with milk. Think you could just eat them dry? They melt in your mouth, too. Our taste tester also noted that the flavor is remarkably close to that of cardboard. Overall, not a pleasant experience. The only redeeming feature our taste tester found was that the cereal was low fat, which is probably true of cardboard, also.

It wasn't just our taste tester who had an issue with Millville Crispy Oats. Several threads on Reddit feature angry criticisms of the cereal. No cereal should ever be bad enough to make someone angry, but here we are. One thread asked for opinions and started innocently enough with a few fans of the cereal. Then came one Redditor who disliked them so much, they threw the cereal out. That was followed by complaints that they were bland and not worth the savings.

Another Redditor said the Crispy Oats taste like machine parts, which is as creative as it is uncomplimentary. Things got much worse in a Reddit thread entitled "Is it just me, or does Millville's Crispy Oats suck!?" The poster went on to make two observations about the cereal. One, agreeing with our taste tester, was that Crispy Oats did not live up to their name once exposed to milk. They became instantly soggy with no grace period in between to try to enjoy any crunchy texture. The poster's other complaint was that the cereal tasted like salted fish. Another comment on the same thread was that Millville cereals taste like the box they came in. That was our taste tester's experience, but your mileage may vary, as they say.

So, whether Millville Crispy Oats end up tasting like salted fish, machine parts, or cardboard, it may not be worth the lower price point. But you never know. Some people really do like them. If you have a couple dollars to spare and want to roll the dice next time you're at Aldi, see for yourself. Or just try Millville Honey Graham Squares, the best Aldi breakfast cereal on the shelves in our eyes.