Dollar Tree's Breakfast Snack Find Is A Dupe Of This Common Cereal Brand
A lot of the products that Dollar Tree sells are from its own private labels. But it offers name-brand items at a big discount too, like Swiss Miss hot chocolate for $1.25 or Harry and David gourmet coffee for a steal. Shoppers can also discover dupes of name-brand products on the shelves as well. One of them is a breakfast snack that is a copy of Kellogg's Special K Strawberry Pastry Crisps.
Like Kellogg's Special K, Dollar Tree's SunBest Mixed Berries Pastry Crisp are small, jam-filled bars drizzled with icing. A box of SunBest contains four single-serving pouches (eight bars total) for $1.25, which amounts to 31 cents per serving. While affordable, purchasing them through the Dollar Tree website requires a minimum order of 14 boxes for $17.50. In comparison, an 18-pouch (36-bar) box of the name-brand Special K crisps at Walmart costs $7.42, or approximately 41 cents per serving.
SunBest is owned by a more than 160-year-old Dutch company called Hellema, and the boxes call the brand "Original Dutch Bakers" and label the snack a product of the Netherlands. The ingredients seem to indicate that they contain more fruit than the big-name originator. Listed second behind wheat flour is "red fruit flavored filling," which includes strawberries, cherries, and blackcurrants. Kellogg's lists its fruit in the less than 2% section of its ingredient disclosure, naming apple powder and strawberry puree concentrate.
What do customers think of both pastry crisp brands?
Kellogg's debuted its bars back in 2010 in strawberry and blueberry flavors, introducing them originally as Special K Fruit Crisps. It currently also sells them in blueberry and brown sugar cinnamon, in addition to the strawberry. Dollar Tree sells an apple cinnamon flavor along with the mixed berry.
Online comments on the retailers' websites are overwhelmingly positive for both breakfast snacks, which can also be eaten at any time of the day. Reviews on Walmart's site of the Special K pastries call them balanced without being overly sweet, with lots of strawberry flavor, while the dupes are praised on Dollar Tree's site as flavorful and crunchy.
Dollar Tree is not the only low-cost retailer that offers a dupe of the Special K Strawberry Pastry Crisps. Aldi sells Strawberry Pastry Crisps through its Millville house brand, with blueberry and chocolate flavors also available. It has six-pouch, 12-bar boxes for $2.75, the most expensive of the three at 46 cents per serving, and a two-bar serving is also 100 calories. Like SunBest's ingredients, "strawberry flavored filling" is listed second, with strawberry puree concentrate as the fruit component.