Nabisco’s Oreo has been the reigning champion of the “Cookies & Cream” genre since their introduction in 1912, the same year the Titanic sunk. The original flavor is the iconic one we all know and love: chocolate-flavored cookies mixed with a sweet cream. The flavor is so popular that Nabisco tried to stuff their own cookies into their own cream, or something. We have seen this flavor dominate in the form of ice creams, milk shakes, candy bars, cakes, and other dessert offerings. But 103 years after the original Oreo’s introduction, we finally have the product we have all been waiting for: Cookie Pop Cookies & Cream Popcorn.
Cookie Pop Cookies & Cream flavored popcorn is so new that their website still says the product is “coming soon!” as of this writing. I didn’t really know what to expect from this product. Super sweet popcorn flavors are nothing new, and many of them work really well. Often, the sweeter-flavored popcorns use some kind of glaze over the popcorn (think caramel popcorn) or some kind of drizzle (think drizzle). This product is not like that. This product is regular popcorn dusted with “Oreo Basecake Crumbs,” a product you can actually buy in unnecessary quantities.
While they look like popcorn that you dropped on a dirty floor, this popcorn does taste like cookies! Initially. Briefly. Aw, what happened? The Oreo flavor disappears just as fast as Fruit Stripes lost their flavor as well as our hearts in the 1990s. It lands somewhere not sweet enough to be good cookies and not salty enough to be good popcorn. They are oddly addictive like all popcorn is, but you can’t help but want a stronger delivery from this flavor every time you cram more into your mouth. It’s a constant roller coaster of excitement and disappointment. That doesn’t mean this is a bad product by any stretch. It’s reminiscent of cookies, but the soft texture of popcorn coupled with a conservative use of sugar made me feel like I was munching on cookies that were slightly stale. This product is successful because it is popcorn that does invoke a cookie & cream vibe, but I wish it had gone the unhealthier route with a bit more sugar and a bit more salt to really makes this work.
In an effort to ramp up the cookies & cream delivery, I tried placing a bunch of this popcorn between two Oreo cookie wafers:
Somehow Manages to Bring Back Memories of Fruit Stripes Rating: 6 out of 10
Substitutes as Cream in Actual Oreos Rating: 2 out of 10
Overall Rating: 5.5 out of 10
