This invention relates to presweetened breakfast cereal products, and more in particular, to cereal products which have been coated with mixtures of sugars to produce a variety of presweetened cold breakfast cereal products for direct sale to the consumer. The sugars coated onto these cereal products have, at least in part, crystallized, thereby giving a consumer-pleasing frosted effect to the product.
Presweetened cold breakfast cereal products have been sold on the consumer market for many years. Generally, the sugar material which was coated on the surface thereof was sucrose. However, during the past several years when the cost of sucrose has risen, interest has been shown in utilizing a substitute for sucrose; such as, corn syrup solids or dextrose which are generally lower in cost than sucrose. Unfortunately, however, the use of these materials produces presweetened cereals which tend to be hygroscopic, and where the sugar is not crystalline. Rather, these coatings tend to be hard, glassy-type, transparent coatings which tend to become tacky upon storage. Recently, procedures have been developed in the art which enable these coatings to be applied in a form which is relatively non-hygroscopic.
However, it has been found that the use of dextrose or dextrose-containing materials as the coating material on cereal products yields products which are insufficiently sweet for the consumer market. It is thus desirable to replace only a portion of the previously utilized sucrose with the dextrose or dextrose-containing material. Prior to this invention, it has not been possible to produce a coating on a breakfast cereal product wherein dextrose and sucrose are co-crystallized onto the surface of the cereal product. Through the utilization of the process of this invention it is, however, possible to form frosted crystalline coatings on these cereal products wherein at least a portion of the dextrose and sucrose are in the crystalline state.