Top 2 Female Breakfast Cereal Mascots

Posted on Aug 5, 2020

Here’s a challenge for you: name a single female breakfast cereal mascot.

Give up? That doesn’t surprise us. When it comes to breakfast, virtually every mascot is, for some reason, a man. Look up Post, look up Kellogs, all dudes. Cap’n Crunch, Tony the Tiger, the Cocoa Puffs bird whose name escapes me right now… Yep, all men. Not a lady to be seen. Even Lucky Charms has a guy for a mascot. Even Count Chocula. 

What about Fruity Pebbles, you say? Nope. Fred and Barney are clearly the mascots for that one. Not even Pebbles herself gets to be on the box. Even the very first cereal mascot in all recorded cereal history, Elijah from the actual bible, was a man.

Why is this? What is it about cereal that makes mascot designers simply go blind to half of the population? Is it because most of them were designed way back in the 40s, when men liked to pretend women weren’t real? The mysteries abound in the world of breakfast. Where have all the girls gone off to?

Well, dearest reader, we’re here to reveal the truth. There are female breakfast cereal mascots, and we’re going to rank… both of them. From worst to best. Yes, there are only two that we know of, and one of them is pretty dubious if it’s supposed to be a woman or not. But god damn it, we’re not working with a lot here, okay? So bear with us, as we rank the two best female cereal mascots there are.

Number 2: Cool Blue for Malt-O-Meal

A blue kangaroo mascot

Malt-O-Meal is the name-brand cereal (really, it’s a label of Post now) that most people think of when they think of “generic cereal”. You know, the ones that come in huge bags instead of boxes? The ones that are ripoffs of real cereals, like “Marshmallow Mateys” instead of Lucky Charms, or “Tootie Fruities” instead of Froot Loops. Cool Blue is, or at some point was, the mascot of these ripoff cereals. Cool Blue is a kangaroo, with the all-important addition of having a joey named “Li’l Oaty” in their pouch.

Yes, Cool Blue is One Cool Mom hanging out with their son and pushing sugary cinnamon squares to children. Only female kangaroos have pouches for carrying their young in, and yep, look at that, they’ve got a pouch. This means that Cool Blue has the distinction of being the first ever,potentially, female mascot for a major cereal brand.

However… it’s not all that simple. In a comment for a different blog post discussing Cool Blue’s existence, we found a quibble on the idea of Cool Blue being a woman. Cool Blue was intended to be an androgynous character, one who could represent the general idea of “parenthood” with their also-non-gender-specific child in tow. Kangaroos are naturally a good animal for a parent/child mascot, thanks to the kangaroo’s marsupial method of raising their children, but that’s not how kangaroos work. Only female kangaroos have pouches, and only female kangaroos raise the kids. Male kangaroos have little to no participation in the raising of joeys. Cool Blue has to be biologically female.

So, although we would love it if Cool Blue was a woman, they only rank in the number 2 spot due to this biological confusion. Kangaroos are a common subject for this kind of biological sex confusion, much like how American cartoonists never seen sure which sex of cattle have udders or not. We here at Eggware.XYZ absolutely do not want to imply that someone’s biological sex determines in any way their gender, but we’re more than comfortable assuming that Cool Blue is the most kickin’ radical nonbinary mother in the world raising their own nonbinary kid. And that’s worth putting on a list, even if the cereal they sold came in bags way too big and would go stale way before you were finished with it.

Number 1: Pops for Honey Pops

An anthropomorphic bee

Yes! A real, actual 100% woman mascot! Meet Pops, the mascot for “Honey Pops”, the European branding for what we call Corn Pops! She’s a honeybee, as is befitting to a honey-branded cereal, and yes, she’s a woman! Just like real worker bees! Can you believe it? What a win for feminists everywhere.

Frankly, it’s weird that Buzz, the mascot for Honey Nut Cheerios, is a guy. He really should be a woman, right? You could make the argument that he’s a drone, but nope, he’s got a stinger. Drones don’t have stingers. Buzz is a worker bee, plain as day. Well, he’s probably trans, so you know we love a good trans mascot. But that’s not the point here. The point is that Pops is all lady, and we love that.

Here’s a commercial featuring Ms. Pops, taking place in her hive, where they naturally wake up to a delicious… single piece of Honey Pops, because they’re bees and they’re small. And they sing, and they dance, to a decidedly “POP!” sounding song. Yes, that’s very funny, isn’t it? 

In fact, it looks like (once again accurate to bee biology!) that every bee in this commercial is a woman. It’s hard to tell due to them being cartoon bees, but a non-zero number of them have distinctly “feminine” hair. This is a triumph when it comes to girls in cereal advertising.

A similar bee mascot

Now, the really interesting thing about Pop is that she wasn’t always a woman. Preceding her was a very similar mascot, “Loopy”, used for sister cereal Honey Loops, which was basically the same cereal except with a loop shape. But the thing is, we’ve found both art and pins of this “Loopy” character with the name “Pops” emblazoned on his chest. So who is who? Is Loopy the dead name of Pops, and is this art sourced from a mid-transition phase? Is Pops the trans bee cereal mascot that we both deserve and want?

Well, if there’s anything we can say, Pops is definitely the number one female breakfast cereal mascot of all time, because she is pretty much the only intentional female breakfast cereal mascot of all time. It was a long ride to the top, and though the competition was non-existent, she managed to come out in first. Congratulations, Pops, for being a woman. You’ve earned it.

If you can think of any other cereal mascots that even vaguely hint towards being female, let us know. We judge everything we buy by how good the mascot for it is, so now’s the time for Kellogg’s/Post/Quaker/General Mills to get us to shill for their shitty grain foods.

Tagged: breakfast cereal lists mascots

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