Cinnamon Toast Crunch Trends For Containing Shrimp

Cinnamon Toast Crunch has shrimp in it, and people are going bananas.

By Hayden Mears | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

cinnamon toast crunch shrimp

That beloved part of your balanced breakfast, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, supposedly contains shrimp, and the internet is going bananas as they often do.

Cinnamon Toast Crunch is trending on Twitter for containing traces-tails- of the tasty crustacean, which, by the way, is NOT tasty when you’re expecting an explosion of cinnamon and sugar in every bite. To make their situation worse, the folks over at General Mills responded to the initial tweet (included below) by denying that the shrimp tails were shrimp tails. Tough look for Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Here is writer Jensen Karp’s first tweet detailing the discovery of shrimp tails in the popular cereal:

And included below is the response from the official Cinnamon Toast Crunch Twitter account, as well as Karp’s hilarious reply:

This unfortunate discovery hits the internet the same day that Yahoo! published a piece about Pillsbury’s new Cinnamon Toast Crunch rolls. Maybe that is why the people over at General Mills posted a frantic response that amounted to, “That shrimp tail isn’t a shrimp tail. It’s a shrimp-shaped clump of sugar.” Still, they were quick to try to save face, basically saying that Jensen Karp was mistaken in thinking that shrimp tails had somehow found their way into his breakfast.

This is not the first time questionable things have been found in popular cereals. In May 2019, traces of Monsanto weed-killer was found in Cheerios products. That is probably much more serious than a pair of shrimp tails, but still, the fact that weird chemicals and lost crustaceans are being found in everyday products is mildly alarming. General Mills has been taken to court before for not warning consumers about dangerous pesticides in their cereals, but this shrimp fiasco is probably just an honest mistake.

It will be interesting to see how this ends up affecting the Cinnamon Toast Crunch brand. Many people are allergic to shrimp and other kinds of shellfish, so there is actually a certain degree of concern that is reasonable here. But beyond that, it is just super gross. No one wakes up in the morning and says, “I wanna have the shriveled end of a shrimp carcass for breakfast.” And if you do say that, more power to you. I guess.

cinnamon toast crunch box

Will this be the end for Cinnamon Toast Crunch? Probably not, but they’re definitely going to stay on the receiving end of some hilarious internet ire for a few hours. Now, if it were a new brand of cereal that inexplicably contained shrimp tails, that would be an entirely different story.

But because this is Cinnamon Toast Crunch we are talking about, this probably will end up dying down more quickly than people realize. One guy found shrimp tails in his morning cereal. It’s nasty, sure, but it appears to be an isolated incident and should not dissuade parents from buying the sugary cereal. If anything, the more concerning factor here is how much sugar is in each of those delicious little squares. It is a lot, but if it does not bother parents now, it probably won’t at all.