I ate a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch last night. That was a mistake. You should not eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch late at night. It messes with your head, makes you all twitchy, and you have weird dreams as the sugar and cinnamon swirls you’ve ingested assault the blood-brain barrier.

If you compare the nutrition labels, Cinnamon Toast Crunch has as much sugar per serving as most other sweet cereals, but when you look more closely at the serving size, which for Cinnamon Toast Crunch I believe is a single flake, the story changes.

I don’t care because Cinnamon Toast Crunch tastes awesome. It was a brilliant innovation in the field of breakfast technology. In 1984, the cereal potential of miniature marshmallows had been largely explored, so the good people at General Mills decided to miniaturize another sugary snack. Their masterstroke was to restrict their palette to the world of breakfast food, making the morning delight of cinnamon toast both more convenient and more potent. This is why they succeeded where Cookie Crisp failed. (It’s not a surefire formula, though, as the atrocious Waffle Crisp demonstrates.)

That was almost a quarter-century ago. Where is breakfast-cereal innovation today? At the grocery store, all I see are variations on the old standards. Either they contort a classic into a flavor combination that should not exist (cf. Chocolate Lucky Charms¹) or they toss in “real fruit!”—i.e., freeze-dried nuggets that, in a past life, resembled fruit.

My sense is that America’s formerly great cereal industry has run out of ideas, but to confirm that my hunch wasn’t just nostalgia, I decided to take a look at the numbers. I assembled a list of the top selling cereals, as of 2008, from the data provided by breakfast-cereal enthusiast Topher’s Castle. My list included the top 13 cereals on the market (Topher’s chart only breaks out 15 individual brands), as well as each manufacturer’s top five. I excluded Quaker Oatmeal Squares because I couldn’t find any historical data for them (you’ll see why that’s important in a second). I excluded Malt-O-Meal cereals entirely because, c’mon.

I took that list, cross-referenced it with the cereals’ debut years, mostly according to Wikipedia, and put everything on a Dipity timeline. Each cereal is placed according to the year it came out. Click on each entry for some context by way of a pithy comment or two.

Click the “View in Dipity” button for a more expansive look at the whole timeline (Dipity is kind of glitchy, especially in the embedded version, so I recommend clicking through). Note that a little “+” at the bottom of the timeline means there are more entries to display (click on the “+” to view them). Sometimes the Dipity software collapses entries because it is lazy.

What you’ll notice as you browse the timeline is that the period from 1952 to 1969, especially the 1960s, was a boom in cereal development. The 1980s saw a few notable blips, but since then the landscape has been barren. There are no entries past the notable 1989 introduction of Honey Bunches of Oats. Since then, the industry has rested on its laurels.

Where will the next great cereal idea come from? Do we need a cereal Manhattan project, or should the government fund thousands of cereal garages across the nation? I am not content to watch cereal and milk become a dying art.

I’ll probably update the timline with more cereals as I think of them, as the top-sellers hardly comprise everything that General Mills et al. have to offer. If you have anything you want me to add, let me know.

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1. I shamefully admit that I won’t turn up my nose at a bowl of Berry Lucky Charms. ↑