Taste Test: Target’s Pokemon Pop-Tarts — Are They Worth Snagging for Trainers?

Amid the assortment of branded kickballs and Caboodles that are already commanding scalper prices on eBay, Target has unveiled a store-exclusive run of Pokémon-themed Pop-Tarts. Although these Vanilla Cupcake toaster pastries carry no Pokémon imagery on the pastries themselves, only on the packaging, I nonetheless picked up a box for this review—granted, with a few doubts about how truly “new” they are.

Are these Pop-Tarts truly new or not?

We’ll tackle whether “Pokémon Pop-Tarts” qualify as fresh later. For the moment, my focus is on whether the Vanilla Cupcake Pop-Tarts are actually new. I was browsing the Pop-Tarts site, prepared to painstakingly compare the nutrition data of the “new” Vanilla Cupcake with the preexisting Confetti Cupcake to spot any meaningful differences, when I noticed that the pastry image on the front of both flavor boxes was nearly identical. The sole distinction between the two pictures? Kellogg’s appears to have carefully swapped the Confetti Cupcake’s green sprinkles for red, blue, orange, or yellow on the Vanilla Cupcake box.

Frosted Vanilla Cupcake Pokémon Pop-Tarts

Are these new Pokémon Pop-Tarts?

Pros: Setting aside my minor quibbles about the Pokémon theming, the Vanilla Cupcake flavor comes through with gusto. I definitely prefer these to those tiny 12-packs of vanilla cupcakes that mostly taste like frosting and nothing else.

Cons: I’m not too upset that these essentially are Confetti Cupcake Pop-Tarts with a Pikachu box. What does bother me is that these aren’t the long-awaited revival of the original Pokémon Pop-Tarts. Back in 2001, we were treated to PokéBerry Pop-Tarts; I remember those promotional pastries with fondness—even if time has me questioning how exotic the round “Pokéball-shaped” sprinkles truly were. Oh, reviving a one-off flavor from 25 years ago would be too hard? Why not bring back the still-available Wild Cherry Pop-Tarts with Pokémon-shaped sprinkles that appeared a year earlier?

Rating:

7.5/10