Coles High Protein Vanilla Puffs | Chewsday Review

I'm dipping back into the cereal aisle this week and feeling a little hopeful that this could be a contender for replacing Low Sugar Cheerios - maybe it's just the vanilla flavour, but let's find out!

Ingredients

Positives

Negatives

These don’t contain any added iron. This is a big negative.
Sugar is only just above my 15 g per 100g target (coming in at 16g per 100g), so this is a close call, but it also contains sweetener so I expect they taste very sweet. Sweeteners are considered safe but we don’t have specific evidence for their use for children so it’s not something I recommend including regularly.
Fibre is 2.4g per serve (45g), which is okay but for a brekkie cereal I’m hoping for >3g per serve. For example Weet-bix contain 4g of fibre per serve (which is only 31g) and Sultana Bran is a whopping 7.3g of fibre per serve (45g).
These seem expensive for a Coles brand product. At $5 for 300g, they work out to be $16.70 per kg. Lots of branded cereals tend to be around the $7 mark for a 450g box, but you can usually stock up when they’re 1/2 price.

Marketing

“4.5 star health rating.” This means these compare pretty well to other cereals.
“Source of fibre.” Bit of a meh claim, it’s not considered a “good” source or an “excellent” source either.
“13g of protein per serve”. The world is obsessed with protein. Yes, we need some protein BUT we also need carbohydrates, fat and fibre! If you’ve been around here for a while you’ll know that most Aussie kids get way more protein than they actually need from everyday foods (e.g. bread, pasta and cheese).
“With cinnamon”…. can they really say that when it’s 0.3% cinnamon?!

Alternatives

Overall this cereal contains a moderate amount of added sugar, but doesn’t contain added iron and is lower in fibre than I would typically like for a regular breakfast cereal.
It looks like the hunt for another cereal option continues! I’m not feeling confident about finding a replacement for Low Sugar Cheerios once my stash runs out.
As it stands my preferred brekkie options are still Weet-bix, Sultana Bran and oats.

The composition of food products changes regularly. The nutritional values of the products in this Chewsday Review were correct at the time of publishing.