Chex has been coasting on this nation’s goodwill for too long. There, I said it. Nobody ever wants to call Chex out because we fear the wrath of General Mills—so named because when you criticize them, in “general,” they will put you through a “mill,” if you know what I mean. (I mean they will murder you by processing your body in one of their many industrial mills.) But it’s truth time. Each member of the vaunted Chex Godhead—Rice Chex, Wheat Chex, and Corn Chex—stinks its own way.

Rice Chex is passable, better than its reprehensible grain-brother Rice Krispies, but it gets soggy too fast. If you try to eat anything more than a small bowl of Rice Chex, the bottom layers turn to mush long before your spoon can reach them. Revolting.

It doesn’t even take a taste, just a glance, to observe that snuff-colored Wheat Chex is not meant to be. Birthed by a mad General Mills cereal scientist who was later indicted for war crimes, Wheat Chex limped into life with those wimpy squares, those tiny pores struggling against milk-induced suffocation—nature abhors this cereal. And so does anybody who eats it, unless you sprinkle a generous layer of sugar on top every minute or two. Then, it’s not half bad.

As for Corn Chex, it tastes less like corn and more like CornNuts®. It is an atrocious breakfast, and I’ll say no more about it. I will say more about CornNuts, though, because I just visited their website. There’s a picture of some cute monsters eating corn nuts, and this caption:

You’ve found the lost tribe of Stun Nroc. A curious bunch with but one obsession: CornNuts.

There’s a lot to take apart in that sentence. First, at some point, the name of Corn Nuts was officially changed to CornNuts. Think about that for a moment. Someone decided that Corn Nuts needed a “branding” edge over its competitors, and the edge was to get rid of that fuddy-duddy space. This means that on a laptop somewhere, there’s a PowerPoint slide charting sales before and after the name change. The slide is captioned “No-Space Initiative = TWO PERCENT GROWTH!”

Second, “Stun Nroc”? I’m guessing that wasn’t the longest brainstorming session in the world. This is the same marketing team that came up with the brilliant get-rid-of-the-space campaign, and they follow that up with “Stun Nroc”? What a bunch of one-hit wonders. Even I could come up with a better tribe name than that. In fact, I just did: StunNroc.

Back to Chex. The only reason we’ve put up with Chex for so long is because of Chex Mix. And what a mix it is. I’m not talking about the pre-packaged stuff, but the original homemade mix that you bake in the oven. Even here, there are problems. General Mills has quietly updated the “original” recipe to match their commercially packaged dreck, adding mixed nuts and bagel chips to the sacred brew. Go with the true original recipe, where butter and worcestershire sauce somehow combine to make three mediocre cereals taste absolutely freaking delicious.

At long last, this brings us to Cinnamon Chex. With a new cinnamon cereal, General Mills is treading on the hallowed ground of their own Cinnamon Toast Crunch, a cereal so potently scrumptious that it should not be sold to minors. Cinnamon Chex wisely does not try to imitate “CTC,” as they call it on the street. Cinnamon Chex is a unique cereal, where some of the rice Chex squares are dusted with cinnamon and sugar, and some are not. This makes it look strange in the bowl, but it’s an admirably restrained approach.

Cinnamon Chex does have more of a real cinnamon flavor than any cereal I’ve had, but I’m not sure that’s a plus. Literally, I’m not sure. This cereal has me on the fence. It has none of the flaws holding back the original Chex line, so you’d think I would love it. Yet it’s still saddled with that essential Chex boringness. Maybe Chex and milk will never be a winning combination. The cinnamon in this incarnation of Chex doesn’t stick to the squares very well, so the milk develops a layer of tiny red cinnamon flakes, like the cereal is rebelling against its liquid medium. Weird.

In the end, Cinnamon Chex is a solid C, like its brethren, and I doubt there will be a tasty snack-mix recipe to save it. If you want to try this cereal, I’d recommend grabbing it while you can. I’ll be surprised if it survives the year.