Cheerios Have Gone Gluten-Free!

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Have you heard? Cheerios™ are now being made gluten-free, and I’m so excited to be participating in this sponsored campaign letting you know about it!

My kids are beyond thrilled about getting to snack on some of this previously “forbidden fruit”.

As you know, I’m a huge, huge fan of making food from scratch – I just want to start by acknowledging that. But I want to take you back to when I first became a mom. 

Image shows a large box of Cheerios behind a large bowl of Cheerieos with text overlay that reads "Gluten-Free Cheerios Mama's Best Friend"

You know how new moms are. All filled with anxiety about things that later turn out to be no big deal. That was certainly me! 

One of the things I kept thinking about was what I was going to feed my youngster. When my siblings were little (All six of them), they could frequently be found running around with snack bowls of Cheerios. That’s what kept them quiet during church and satisfied between meals. 

But with my husband and most of his family suffering from celiac disease, I knew that I didn’t want to feed my toddlers anything with wheat in it, so you can imagine how bummed I was to learn that Cheerios were off the menu. 

I honestly didn’t know what to do! It may sound silly now – okay, maybe it is silly now, but I’m so glad that gluten-intolerance has become mainstream enough that things like Cheerios are safe and easy to get our hands on now. It makes life so much easier for us celiac moms and our kids. 

Image shows a close up of a large bowl of Cheerios with a box of cereal sitting behind it.

So, what makes gluten-free Cheerios so special anyway?

Oats may be naturally gluten-free, but most farmers rotate their oat crops with gluten-containing grains like wheat, barley, and rye. Unfortunately, this means that on the years oats are grown in a particular field, the harvesters may pick up gluten-containing grains from the last crop. So we can’t trust conventionally packaged oats.

BUT Cheerios has created its own high-tech grain separator, Thanks to an engineer named Phil Zietlow, who went on a six-year mission to make Cheerios gluten-free after discovering that his daughter-in-law had celiac disease.

This grain separator results in less than 20 parts per million of gluten. Each batch is tested to be sure that there is now more than one grain of wheat, barley, or rye per 15,000 grains of oats. 

Images shows several boxes of different varieties of Cheerios on a table

After sifting, the oats go to a mill that is dedicated to making gluten-free flour. After which, the flour is tested to make sure that it’s still gluten-free before going into dedicated gluten-free trucks to be shipped off and made into Cheerios. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty impressed by the lengths they’re going to to keep our Cheerios away from gluten! General Mills wants to make sure everyone can enjoy Cheerios, and considering that as much as 30% of the population avoids gluten, this is a pretty smart move!

Being able to grab a box of gluten-free Cheerios at whatever grocery store I happen to be next to will be a fantastic convenience when we’re traveling, and I have to tell you that after looking at the ingredient and nutrition labels of the Yellow Box Cheerios™, I don’t feel bad about feeding them to my kids either. 

Image shows a white bowl full of Cheerios sitting on a table with boxes of the cereal.

It’s pretty impressive. First ingredient is whole grain oats. Only one gram of sugar per serving (in a breakfast cereal?? For real!). And guess what the preservative is. Vitamin E. What? Yep For real. 

General Mills is making the transition to gluten-free right now, and it won’t be long before all the Cheerios boxes you see with be stamped with the gluten-free seal in the bottom right corner (for now, just make sure you look for it before you check out!)

By the way, what’s your favorite Cheerios variety? My mom would never buy us anything other than Yellow Box (plain), or sometimes Honey-Nut, but in our taste testing (you know I had to try all five 😉 ), my whole family decided that we liked the Apple Cinnamon Cheerios best!

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Gluten-Free Cheerios.

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3 Comments

  1. I was so excited to try these. I bought a box of the honey nut cheerios that were gluten free….but alas they made me sick for days. (and I can tolerate oats so there had to be some cross contamination) Be careful.

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