Jason Wolf: How my love for Josh's Jaqs led to a Flutie Flakes revelation

I wouldn’t have bought Josh Allen’s cereal on my own, and when my wife brought a box home, it sat unopened in the cupboard for months.

When the NFL draft rolled around, I finally poured a bowl, tweeted a photo and declared it the Breakfast of (AFC East) Champions.

I was floored by every bite.

Josh’s Jaqs is the most sugary, incredible, delicious cereal I’ve ever eaten.

And there’s no way the Buffalo Bills’ quarterback – an elite professional athlete – actually eats this stuff, right?

“I’m not a huge breakfast guy,” Allen said last week, “but when I do eat breakfast it’s typically what I would do at home. I’m a big cereal guy.”

Cap’n Crunch, my longtime favorite, was the most sugary cereal ranked by CNN last year, checking in at 45 grams of sugar per 100 grams of dry cereal. That’s higher than Lucky Charms, Frosted Flakes and the rest of the top 10: Fruity Pebbles, Cookie Crisp, Cocoa Puffs, Apple Jacks, Trix, Reese’s Puffs and Froot Loops.

Josh’s Jaqs tops them all with 47.5 grams of sugar per 100 grams of dry cereal.

The name, an acronym, stands for “Josh Allen Quarterback.” The red and blue loops mark the first time PLB Sports & Entertainment, the company behind countless athlete-endorsed food products, from the iconic Flutie Flakes to Stefon Diggs’ hot sauce, distributed a colored cereal. And 17% of the proceeds benefit John R. Oshei Children’s Hospital.

“I think it’s good,” Allen said. “Obviously, I wanted (a name) kind of like Flutie Flakes. I wanted the Josh’s Jaqs, the alliteration there. I grew up eating Apple Jacks all the time and to kind of play off of that and have it red and blue, that’s cool.”

What's your favorite cereal?

Flutie didn’t know Allen had his own cereal.

“See, now, I’m going to take a percentage,” Flutie said, laughing. “Right after we did the Flutie Flakes thing, Kurt Warner came out with a box, there were a handful of guys. And now a lot of them have done it. And it’s like, ‘Damn. We should have somehow copyrighted this where I get a kickback.’ But that’s great. I love it. And if nothing else, it’s great for Josh, it’s great for the team, it’s great marketing, it’s fun.”

The sale of Flutie Flakes benefitted the Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation for Autism, which the quarterback created in honor of his son.

The nonprofit has raised more than $15 million for charity.

Flutie said the idea for Flutie Flakes was hatched in 1998, after his second season with the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League.

“I hadn’t even signed with the Bills yet when I’d done that endorsement deal,” Flutie said. “PLB Sports came to me and they were talking about some type of food and I thought, ‘Well I like frozen pizzas, so let’s go with a frozen pizza.’ And they said, ‘OK.’ And then they came back and said, ‘The profit margin is better on cereal. What’s your favorite cereal?’ ”

Ty Ballou, the president of PLB Sports, recalled the negotiation.

“Flutie Pizza didn’t have quite the same ring as Flutie Flakes,” Ballou said.

The timing of the release couldn’t have been sweeter.

“It was supposed to come out at the beginning of the year, but it was delayed,” Flutie said. “By the time it came out, I came off the bench in the game before and I was going to make my first start and it was like the perfect storm.”

Flutie went 7-3 as a starter in his first season with the Bills. He was voted to the Pro Bowl and named the NFL Comeback Player of the Year by the Associated Press and the Pro Football Writers of America.

There have been six versions of Flutie Flakes, including exclusive boxes in Canada, New England (Flutie won the Heisman Trophy at Boston College and played for the Patriots), San Diego (Supercharged Flutie Flakes) and 10th and 20th anniversary editions. Walmart stocked it nationally.

It has sold 3 million boxes.

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“People say, ‘Why don’t you do another one?’ ” Ballou said. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah. Why don’t you come up with another Rubik’s Cube or Cabbage Patch?’ I’ve been trying to do another Flutie Flakes the last 23 years. There is only one Doug Flutie.”

'It's the same thing'

The Cereal Spot on Hertel Avenue stocks more than 200 varieties of breakfast cereal, including rare and discontinued brands from across the continent.

“Cereal culture is a real thing,” co-owner Eric Dacey said.

The store sells bowls of cereal, homemade cereal bars, ice cream with cereal as toppings and other cereal-related merchandise. It also has tables modeled after cereal boxes, including Josh’s Jaqs and Flutie Flakes, with QR codes on the side to donate to their charities.

There’s a couple of original, sealed boxes of Flutie Flakes on display, which they don’t sell.

And on the counter sit numerous limited-edition, regionally released cereals distributed by PLB Sports, including Patrick Mahomes’ “Mahomes Magic Crunch,” which has sold 900,000 boxes the last two years at 35 Hy-Vee grocery stores in Kansas City.

They are identical to Flutie Flakes.

“It’s the same thing as Flutie. It’s a frosted corn flake,” Ballou, the president of PLB Sports, said.

All of the company’s cereals are produced at three Gilster-Mary Lee factories in the Midwest.

Other NFL-related cereals available include Nick Chubb’s “Chubb Crunch,” Alvin Kamara’s “Kamara’s King Crunch” and DeAndre Hopkins’ “HopBox,” which depicts the Arizona Cardinals wide receiver jumping to make a catch between three defenders.

“That is the ‘Hail Murray.’ And it was funny,” said Don Coppola, a regional sales representative at MOD-PAC, the Buffalo company that prints all the boxes. “When we saw the design for that, I actually called Ty at PLB and I was like, ‘You know, these graphics might get screwed up when we go to print this box. I can’t make any promises on this one.’ ”

Other Buffalo athletes have had their own cereals.

Jim Kelly had “Kelly Krunch” when he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2002.

There was Terrell Owens’ T.O.’s in 2009, Ryan Miller’s Kick-Save Krunch in 2010 and Mario Williams’ MariO’s in 2012.

All were honey toasted oats.

Josh’s Jaqs haven’t sold as well as Mahomes’ cereal, but Buffalo is a smaller market.

“We sold 150,000 boxes last year, which is insane,” Ballou said. “This year, we’ve sold about 125,000 boxes halfway through the season. We’re about 600,000 behind Patrick, but he had a Super Bowl win. The Bills win the Super Bowl, all bets are off.”

The second edition of the Josh’s Jaqs box contains a typo, Dacey pointed out.

The name this year is spelled “Josh’s Jaq’s,” with a second apostrophe, which might add to its collectability, for those who keep it sealed.

One of The Cereal Spot’s original boxes of Flutie Flakes was recently opened.

“One of my employees accidentally served a bowl of it to somebody,” Cereal Spot co-owner Ranger Korpanty said, “and we joke with her a lot because she was born a month after the expiration of the cereal.”

Dacey shook a handful of 22-year-old Flutie Flakes into my hand, and some Mahomes Magic Crunch into the other. The Flutie Flakes were paler, likely given their age, but otherwise indistinguishable.

I ate both. Neither were as good as Josh’s Jaqs. But the Flutie Flakes were better.

Still crispy. Maybe a little sweeter. They had aged like a fine wine!

It turns out the old Flutie Flakes contained a higher percentage of sugar than the more recent versions. I should have figured. It’s tough to top an original.