me & goji Custom Artisanal Cereal Review

I found out that I was a diabetic back in December of 2004. As soon as I received that diagnosis, I immediately began working out regularly and stopped drinking regular sodas and eating candy bars for lunch.  Within a year, blood tests no longer indicated that I was diabetic. But I grew up watching my mom struggle with the disease and ultimately dying at a very young age of 56, so I didn’t let my annual tests fool me into thinking that I had cured myself. I know that as soon as I start eating sweets and other crap that I’ll be right back in the ‘bad’ zone again. In the last couple of years, I’ve stopped working out (due to shoulder problems) and tend to ‘cheat’ more on the weekends than I used to. My blood tests continue to show that I’m ok, but I’m ready to start an exercise routine and choose healthier foods and snacks. When the people at me & goji offered to let me create my own custom cereal, I thought it sounded like a unique (and yummy) idea and jumped at the chance to check out their nutritious cereals.

Created by two college friends, me & goji is a New Hampshire based company that offers people the unique opportunity to create their own blend of cereals from a choice of over 60 fresh and healthy ingredients. The cereals are packaged in sealed tubes that offer between 15 – 21 servings depending on the chosen ingredients. In order to review their product, they allowed me to create two different blends.

The creation process is fun and easy using their web based creation tool, which walks you through the steps of creating your custom cereal blend. The first step is to choose the base. I used their Artisanal cereal for one and golden granola for the other.

For each ingredient, you can see all the nutritional information.

Step 2 allows you pick 1-2 more ingredients to enhance the base. There are 20 different items to choose from including additional cereal flakes like corn, barley, shredded wheat, to things like chocolate covered peanuts, cranberries and chocolate chips.

Next up are the fruit choices. They offer all kinds of dried fruits that you don’t normally see in off the shelf cereals. Raspberries, goji berries, golden berries, etc.

After the fruits come the nuts and seeds. You can’t have fruits without nuts right? 😉 Like the fruit selection, there are also a good variety of nuts / seeds to choose from. Some of them include brasil nuts, pine nuts, pumpkin seeds, pistachios, etc.

As you continue to add different ingredients to your blend, you will see the price add up as each individual ingredient has its own price associated with it.

Once you’ve completed your selections, you’ll see the nutritional information and you’ll be able to name your cereal blend. You can even upload a picture that will appear on the label if you want to pay the extra $2.99 for that option; I skipped that step. If you click the image above, you can see the two cereals that I created.

This is my Gear Crunch blend with the artisanal cereal base. I also added chocolate covered goji berries, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, pistachios, pine nuts and sunflower.

And this is the Gadget Crunch blend with the golden granola, oat loops, macadamia nuts, apples, raisins, pumpkin seeds and more.

Both of these cereals taste absolutely delicious! The flakes, nuts and seeds are very crunchy and fresh, while the fruits are chewy. I don’t eat cereal with milk, I just eat it dry as a snack. But even so, I know this stuff would stand up to milk very well since it’s so crunchy. You can definitely taste the premium ingredients. It all tastes so good that it would be easy to eat the whole tube in a day.

You’re probably wondering how far a tube of this cereal will go. The flake based cereal blends are about 21+ ounces, where the granola based cereal blends are 30 ounces, which gives you about 15 3/4cup and 21 1/2 cup servings respectively. You can compare that to a 14 ounce box of Kashi cereal which gives you 8 servings (not sure of the serving size though).

The price of the 2 cereal blends that I created ended up costing $37.80 which is considerably more than 2 or 3 boxes of Multi-Grain Cheerios (one of my faves) from your local grocery store. I wish I was Oprah rich so I could buy this stuff all the time, but unfortunately, I’m stuck with eating Cheerios 95% of the time. I do know that I’ll splurge every so often on a tube of me & goji custom cereal though because this stuff is addictive – in a healthy way.