The Brief, Monstrous Life of Fruit Brute

The complete rise and fall of a General Mills classic

In 2013, General Mills staged a strange revival. For the first time in the forty years that General Mills had been producing them, the brand’s quintet of monster-themed sugary cereals were briefly available at the same time — including two varieties that had been discontinued for poor sales.

As one writer described the series of monster cereals: “Some were successful, and remain in cereal aisles to this day…and some were Fruit Brute.”

Compared to cereals that riffed on famous horror movie standards like Dracula and Frankenstein’s creature, Fruit Brute was probably doomed to fail from the start. Although the cereal’s mascot was spun from the Wolf Man stories, he more closely resembled a fox and wore rainbow-striped overalls. The monsters’ schtick in commercials was that they were wobbly kneed and spooked easily, yet Fruit Brute comes into the commerical above in opposition to that theme. He was an odd man out from the very beginning.

Another guess behind the demise of Fruit Brute has to do with flavoring. Fruit Brute (and its compatriot, the also discontinued Fruity Yummy Mummy) were multi-fruit cereals. The simplicity of Count Chocula (chocolate), Boo Berry (blueberry), and Franken Berry (strawberry) may have endeared them to consumers in a way that a jumble of fruit flavorings could not. (Franken Berry even contained an alarming non-digestible coloring that turned the cereal’s aftermath hot pink — yet it remains in production to this day, albeit with an updated recipe.) By comparison, Fruit Brute has been compared to Froot Loops, and of all the pure sugar additions they could have chosen, the creators made the iffy choice to add lime-flavored marshmallows.

To this speculation, I would like to add that each time I type “Fruit Brute” it becomes more difficult to resist typing “Frute Brute,” which is exactly the kind of dumb intentional misspelling that wildly successful cereals have hung their hats on (including Trix, Froot Loops, and Rice Krispies, to name a few success stories). Is there a substantive connection between these misspellings and the cereals’ enduring sales? I have no evidence for or against this theory.

But despite poor sales, Fruit Brute has something that the other cereals lack: Immortality. In Quentin Tarantino’s universe, where people smoke Red Apple cigarettes and eat Big Kahuna burgers, Fruit Brute was never discontinued. Peep the props hanging out in the margins of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, and you’ll see Fruit Brute there, preserved in celluloid forever.

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