Reese's Puffs
Peanut butter and chocolate at the breakfast table — the transgressive thrill of eating a Reese's Cup and calling it cereal. It launched in 1994 as Reese's Peanut Butter Puffs, and every kid who poured a bowl understood exactly what they were getting away with.
Reese's Puffs launched in May 1994 as Reese's Peanut Butter Puffs, and the pitch was audacious: General Mills licensed the Reese's name from Hershey and put a candy brand on a cereal box. The transgression was the whole appeal. The original formula flavored each corn puff with both chocolate and peanut butter at once; a later revision split them into separate chocolate puffs and peanut butter puffs mixed in the same bag. Either way, kids understood they were eating candy for breakfast and getting away with it, and the name eventually shortened to just Reese's Puffs.
The brand found a second cultural life in the late 2000s, when its earnest, goofy rap-jingle commercials became memes in their own right — impossible to unhear once heard. The product kept modernizing underneath: artificial flavors and colors were removed in 2015, and in 2018 the cereal sold over 35 million boxes, roughly $121 million worth.
Still sold today, Reese's Puffs outlived most of the 90s' candy-brand cereal experiments. The commercials have changed, the formula has been tweaked, but the core promise — chocolate and peanut butter before 8 a.m. — endures.
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