In my review of Millville’s Triple Berry Oatmeal, I noted, among other things, that the $1.19 price point is pretty excessive. And it is, especially for what you get. Even though Apple Walnut sounded a lot better, I would have been just fine going without it had they not been marked down on my next trip, to $.99. Laugh if you must, but the twenty cent drop made a difference because that is the maximum retail price that I think these should go for; I still didn’t feel like I was getting a good deal, but $1 for a full serving of oatmeal isn’t all that terrible. Besides, I was looking forward to this one the most, so I wanted to have enough of a reason to give it a shot.
I was hoping that there would be a little bit of cinnamon in this one, because everyone knows that apples and cinnamon go together incredibly well, but slightly to my chagrin, it only has “golden sugar”, which is a combination of sugar and molasses. As with the triple berry variation, there are some pretty large chunks of real (dried) apples and cranberries in here, on top of the walnut, so I guess that kind of helps to justify the larger price tag.
Tastewise, this one is a lot better than the triple berry. I still think it could have benefited a bit more with even a little bit of cinnamon, but the molasses/sugar combination does a good job of delivering sweetness throughout the cup. The cranberry taste wasn’t really noticeable to me, but you can’t miss the apple; the walnuts are rather soft, as you might expect from microwavable oatmeal, but there’s not really enough of them to give off that much of a flavor. The crunchiness does add a bit of texture for those that don’t like the weird softness of oatmeal, though, and the pieces are pretty big when you do stumble on them.
Basically if you like apples and oatmeal, you’re going to like this. Again, even at the discounted $.99 I paid for it, it still feels a little overpriced, and unless it gets marked down even more, I won’t pick up either flavor again. But if you like oatmeal way more than we do, or have a much more disposable income than we do, or find it deeply discounted, then this might be something that should be on your radar.
Overall: 6/10. It’s a lot like you’re probably expecting: the taste of apples, a little bit of sweetness, and that‘s about it. The walnut pieces are pretty large, but no matter how much I stirred it up, they always seemed to sink to the bottom. I didn’t even realize there were cranberry pieces in there until I happened to read the container, and unlike the walnut and apple pieces, the cranberries are really thin; thus, they don’t provide any kind of discernable taste. I paid $.99 for this because it was marked down–even at that price, it feels kind of hefty, with the regular $1.19 price tag even more ridiculous. It’s not bad at all, but I didn’t think the end result justified the price; I’ll be fine sticking to the cheap oatmeal packets, no matter how questionable their contents are.
