(I write listicles now)

(there are only 7 eligible high-protein breakfast cereals, so the ones at the bottom are still technically among the 7 best even though they’re not good)

If you search the internet, you can find rankings of the best “high-protein” breakfast cereals. But most of the entries on those lists don’t even have that much protein. I don’t like that, so I made my own list.

This is my ranking of genuinely high-protein breakfast cereals, which I define as containing at least 25% calories from protein.

Many food products like to advertise how many grams of protein they have per serving. That number doesn’t matter because it depends on how big a serving is. Hypothetically, if a food had 6g protein per serving but each serving contained 2000 calories, that would be a terrible deal. The actual number that matters is the proportion of calories from protein.

My ranking only includes vegan cereals because I’m vegan. Fortunately most cereals are vegan anyway. The main exception is that some cereals contain whey protein, but that’s not too common—most of them use soy, pea, or wheat protein instead.

High-protein cereals, ranked by flavor

1. Oatmeal with added protein powder (27% calories from protein, if you make it the way I do)

This is regular oatmeal because I couldn't find a stock photo of oatmeal mixed with protein powder.

You can buy pre-mixed oatmeal and protein powder, but it’s unnecessarily expensive so I prefer to mix it myself. Obviously the amount of protein varies depending on how much protein powder you add. I personally like to mix:

  1. two servings of oats (= one cup, or 300 calories)
  2. one scoop of protein powder (= 1/3 cup, or 25 grams, or 90 calories)

Those proportions provide 40% calories from protein. I find the consistency gets sticky if you add more protein than that. If you don’t like the consistency at this ratio, you can add more oats/less protein.

I save time by mixing the oats and protein powder in a giant jug. The jug lasts me for a few weeks and this way I don’t have to measure out the proportions every morning.

Oatmeal is my favorite cereal because there are so many ways to make it. I like to mix in blueberries, blackberries, or bananas, which add nutrients and cover up the protein-y flavor. (Plain oatmeal with protein powder tastes kind of weird.)

This mixture has 30% calories from protein without fruit and about 27% with fruit.

2. Special K High Protein Chocolate Almond (33% calories from protein)

This is my favorite cold breakfast cereal. Most high-protein cereals taste merely tolerable, but this one tastes actively good. It has a nice crunchy texture from the combination of almonds and cereal flakes, and it has enough sugar to give it a good flavor.

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be available anymore. I reached out to customer service to ask if it’s discontinued and they said they’re still producing it, but I haven’t been able to find it anywhere. (Nobody else seems to be able to find it either—see the product reviews here.)

(Special K High Protein should not be confused with Special K Protein, which did not qualify for my list because it has less than 25% calories from protein.)

3. Wheaties Protein (supplemented with lysine) (32% calories from protein)

Wheaties Protein is the only other high-protein cold cereal I’d consider good, although not quite as good as Special K High Protein.

Be aware that this cereal’s protein comes primarily from wheat, which doesn’t have much of the amino acid lysine. It has plenty of every other essential amino acid, but if you eat a lot of this cereal, you need to make sure you get lysine from somewhere else.

To get a full amino acid profile, you need to add about 1 gram of lysine per 60 grams of wheat protein. I personally buy these lysine supplements and take one 500mg pill per bowl of cereal.

4. Catalina Crunch Dark Chocolate (40% calories from protein)

(There are other flavors too, but the only one I’ve tried is the dark chocolate flavor.)

This cereal’s texture isn’t actively good, like I don’t look forward to eating it, but it’s good enough. It doesn’t get soggy in milk and it doesn’t fall apart in your mouth. It’s sugar-free, but it tastes surprisingly good to me (I usually don’t like sugar-free cereals). The downside is it’s pretty expensive compared to most breakfast cereals.

5. Post Premier Protein (44% calories from protein)

This cereal has two different flavors, Chocolate Almond and Mixed Berry Almond. I personally like the chocolate flavor better. Both have a passably good flavor and texture.

Post Premier Protein gets most of its protein from wheat, which, as I mentioned before, doesn’t contain much lysine. Fortunately it also contains pea protein, which has an abundance of lysine.

I don’t know the exact protein ratios, but I believe the overall balance still doesn’t contain enough lysine, so it would be prudent to get some extra lysine from somewhere else. I personally would take one 500mg lysine pill per two bowls of cereal. (I always eat two bowls for breakfast because I’m a growing boy.)

6. Special K Zero (50% calories from protein)

If you had to guess which of Special K High Protein and Special K Zero had more protein, you might think it’s the one with “protein” in the name, but you’d be wrong. This cereal contains an extraordinary 50% calories from protein with a good amino acid composition. Unfortunately, the reason it has so much protein is that it’s basically just lumps of protein powder.

When I take a bite of this cereal, it tastes good for the first five seconds or so. Then it dissolves into a powdery mush—it feels like I’ve poured wet protein powder directly into my mouth. I wouldn’t eat Special K Zero unless I was really desperate for protein. (Even then, I would rather have a protein shake.)

But some people seem to like it so your mileage may vary.

7. Three Wishes (24% to 27% calories from protein, depending on flavor)

Like Special K Zero, Three Wishes feels like eating protein powder flakes. But it only has half as much protein as Special K Zero. If you can stomach eating protein powder flakes, you might as well eat Special K Zero instead.

(I’ve only tried one flavor of Three Wishes, but it was a while ago and I don’t remember which flavor it was. I assume the other flavors have the same bad protein-y texture as the one I tried.)

Honorable mention: Kashi Go

Kashi Go, with 24% calories from protein, just barely does not qualify for my list. It has a good flavor and texture, but it makes my mouth feel weird if I eat too much of it. (I get the same mouth feeling when I eat a lot of spinach.) If it had that extra one percentage point of protein, I would put it at #4 on my list.

Unranked because it’s not vegan: Magic Spoon (33% to 37% calories from protein, depending on flavor)

I’ve never eaten Magic Spoon because it’s not vegan (it contains milk protein).

Drew Gooden says it’s bad and he makes funny YouTube videos which means he must have good opinions about cereal. His description of eating Magic Spoon sounds a lot like my experience eating Special K Zero and Three Wishes—it tastes good for a few seconds, then it turns into a protein mush.

Some other non-vegan cereals that I know nothing about

  • Snack House Keto Cereal: 44% calories from protein (uses milk protein)
  • Julian Bakery ProGranola Cereal: 44% calories from protein (uses egg white protein (weird choice but ok))
  • Perfect Keto Cereal: 36% calories from protein (uses milk protein) (appears to be discontinued)
  • Wonderworks Keto Friendly Breakfast Cereal: 35% calories from protein (uses milk and soy protein)

Those are all the high-protein breakfast cereals that I’m aware of.

Price table

This table gives the price of each cereal in terms of cents per gram of protein, ordered from cheapest to most expensive. I pulled these prices off Amazon; the prices in your area might differ.

For the cost of protein oatmeal, I used Quaker 1-Minute Oats plus NOW Foods Soy Protein Isolate because those are the brands I buy.

Cereal Price (¢/g)
oatmeal + protein powder 3.7¢
Post Premier Protein 4.2¢
Special K High Protein 4.8¢
Wheaties Protein 4.9¢
Special K Zero 7.9¢
Catalina Crunch 9.1¢
Kashi Go 11.4¢1
Three Wishes 12.5¢

Prices for non-vegan cereals:2

Cereal Price (¢/g)
Julian Bakery ProGranola 10¢
Wonderworks Keto Friendly 13.5¢
Magic Spoon 13.8¢
Snack House Keto 16.5¢

Notes

  1. This is strangely expensive for a big-brand cereal (Kashi is a subsidiary of Kellogg), my guess is there’s some sort of temporary supply issue and the price will go down. ↩

  2. How convenient for my pro-vegan agenda that the non-vegan cereals are all so expensive!

    Inconveniently for my agenda, the cheapest of the non-vegan cereals uses egg protein, which causes more animal suffering than whey protein.

    Honestly I’m not that concerned about whey protein, it’s one of the least harmful animal products to buy. ↩