Totino's Breakfast Snack Bites Review: A Fun Snack But Not A Breakfast Game-Changer

Plenty of casual perusers of the frozen food aisle might not know that iconic pizza roll brand Totino's changed pizza forever by effectively inventing the frozen pizza as we know it today. Now Totino's is aiming to perhaps change the game once again with its Breakfast Snack Bites, which contain not pizza ingredients but different kinds of breakfast scrambles within the same bite-sized casing as its pizza rolls.

The advent of Totino's Breakfast Snack Bites is more-or-less timed to capitalize on something of a resurgence in popularity for the pizza roll brand. A few years before the breakfast bites' 2024 release, for example, homemade pizza rolls became an online sensation. Around this same time, fans of the flagship Totino's product began floating the idea of a breakfast pizza roll on social media. Eventually the brand responded. "For those asking about breakfast pizza rolls, I hear you, I see you, I support you," reads a February 2021 post to the Totino's Facebook page.

It wasn't until 2024, however, that Totino's debuted this very product it teased years prior. Here's what you need to know about the Totino's Breakfast Snack Bites, as well as the factors I took into account in my personal review after trying all three flavors.

Totino's Breakfast Snack Bites come in three flavors: Pork Shoulder Bacon & Cheese Scramble, Sausage & Cheese Scramble, and Cheesy Chorizo Scramble. Rather than attempt to approximate a breakfast pizza, these flavors — as their names all indicate — are based on different kinds of breakfast scrambles, hence the lack of "pizza" in their branding.

Housing each shade of breakfast scramble is the iconic, egg roll-derived shell that also serves as the base for the brand's quintessential pizza rolls. All three flavors contain what their lists of ingredients call "fully cooked & formed seasoned meatless crumbles" and "imitation cheddar cheese." Notably lacking from the breakfast bites is egg, so the scramble element is derived entirely from that mix of meatless crumbles and cheese. It's worth noting that this imitation cheddar is fairly close in composition to the imitation mozzarella cheese Totino's includes in its pizza rolls, so fans of the brand's signature offering may well find that element familiar. What effectively acts as their sole differentiating factor is the meat component listed in each flavor's name.

Each box of Totino's Breakfast Snack Bites contains 40 bites in total. The suggested retail price for all three variants is $7.19. Tracking down the Totino's Breakfast Snack Bites might take some luck and/or vigilance. Their initial availability, as of May 2024, is limited to a select number of grocery stores. According to the press release announcing their debut, while they should be located in the frozen breakfast section of most stores that have them in stock, some stores are choosing instead to place them near the Totino's line of pizza and pizza-adjacent products.

Over the course of the summer of 2024, Totino's will expand the availability of its Breakfast Snack Bites at Walmart and Kroger stores specifically. Kroger, notably, encompasses names like Food 4 Less, Fred Meyer, Ralphs, and Smith's. So, anyone living in a city without a Kroger location may still be able to find the Totino's breakfast bites at a grocery store under the brand's broader umbrella.

Compositionally, the Totino's Breakfast Snack Bites are identical on the outside to the pizza rolls from which they're derived. While enriched flour is the first ingredient in each product, however, the second ingredient in each kind of pizza roll is tomato puree, while the breakfast bites' second ingredient is water. This is indicative of the fact that, whereas Totino's pizza rolls are filled predominately with tomato sauce, the breakfast bites contain just slightly more empty space, lacking a traditional sauce that might otherwise fill that space.

The next biggest similarity between the breakfast bites and pizza rolls is their imitation cheese content. Altogether, the imitation cheddar in the breakfast bites contains many of the same ingredients as the pizza rolls' imitation mozzarella.

Unsurprisingly, the seasoned meatless crumbles, breakfast sausage, and chorizo components are all ingredients unprecedented in any pizza roll flavor. The bacon in the bacon variant, meanwhile, is identical to a "diced bacon cured pork shoulder ground and formed" ingredient in a Pepperoni & Bacon pizza roll flavor, making the Pork Shoulder Bacon & Cheese Scramble bites technically the most similar of the three new products to a standard pizza roll.

One serving of 10 Pork Shoulder Bacon & Cheese Scramble Breakfast Snack Bites contain 330 calories, so the entire package amounts to 1,320 calories. That same quantity of 10 also contains 12 grams of fat, 4 grams of which are saturated fat, 10 milligrams of cholesterol, 690 grams of sodium, 45 grams of carbs, 2 grams of dietary fiber, 3 grams of sugar, and 11 grams of protein.

A single serving of 10 Sausage & Cheese Scramble Breakfast Bites is just slightly more calorically dense, netting 340 calories, which is equivalent to 1,360 per package. That serving likewise contains 12 grams of fat, 4 grams of which are saturated fat, 10 milligrams of cholesterol, 640 grams of sodium, 49 grams of carbs, 3 grams of dietary fiber, 1 gram of sugar, and an equivalent 11 grams of protein.

Finally, 10 Cheesy Chorizo Scramble Breakfast Bites similarly contain 340 calories, meaning 1,360 per package. Those 10 breakfast bites also contain 13 grams of fat, 4.5 grams of which are saturated fat, 10 milligrams of cholesterol, 620 grams of sodium, 46 grams of carbs, 2 grams of dietary fiber, 3 grams of sugar, and 10 grams of protein.

For better or for worse, the outer shell of the Pork Shoulder Bacon & Cheese Scramble Breakfast Snack Bites — and therefore all three breakfast bites flavors — is a key component. That's because it accounts for a high percentage of each breakfast bite's total mass. Since that egg roll wrapper-derived shell has already been refined texturally and flavor-wise through its longtime use in Totino's signature pizza rolls, it's pretty unsurprisingly solid.

What makes the bacon breakfast bites arguably a tier lower in flavor quality than the two alternative breakfast bite variants is that their bacon component is at best an acquired taste, and perhaps a flavor some consumers may not enjoy. In contrast to classic strips of cooked bacon, these are cubed bits of preserved, somewhat artificial-tasting pork closer in nature to Canadian bacon (which, by the way, isn't really Canadian).

The best quality of these breakfast bites is a satisfying fattiness. Their cheddar cheese component alone contributes a prominent fatty element, and the rich pork meat pairs particularly well with it. That said, the other two flavors better deliver on the promise of a breakfast-y alternative to the classic Totino's pizza roll than the Pork Shoulder Bacon & Cheese Scramble.

While the housing for each kind of breakfast bite's filling is key to its flavor, the scramble component is overshadowed in all three cases by the meat it accompanies. As a result, the differences between all three flavors are significant, even if each flavor is virtually identical in every aspect other than the meat it contains.

The fact that the Totino's breakfast sausage tastes particularly good, then, is a major benefit to the Sausage & Cheese Scramble Breakfast Snack Bites' taste. It's the spices in the sausage that are at its forefront, making the sage that underlies a standard American sausage its most prominent flavor component. Since its meatless crumbles largely contribute texture rather than flavor, this breakfast bite variant becomes in its totality akin to a sage-forward sausage in a liquid cheese sauce, housed in a signature Totino's wrapper on its outside. It also appears there's more meat on average than what's included in the bacon flavor, which makes sense given the typically higher price of bacon than sausage.

Detracting from what the Sausage & Cheese flavor does well — and technically applying to each other flavor too — is its composition. Even if the taste of the shell on the outside is good, it should be said that the shell is just a little too prominent, dulling the cheesy sausage element more than might be ideal.

Just like how the bacon and sausage effectively make or break their respective flavor variants, the chorizo included in each Cheesy Chorizo Scramble Breakfast Snack Bite is what makes this the highlight of the new line of Totino's breakfast bites.

The pork used in the Totino's chorizo recipe is just fatty enough, providing a satisfying base for the visually red, paprika-forward chorizo flavoring. It's worth noting that this is the only one of the three breakfast bite flavors that might be considered spicy, though that spice is very much on the mild end of the spectrum. Since cooked chorizo is softer than bacon or even sausage, it's in the Cheesy Chorizo Scramble flavor that the meat blends the most with its scramble components, becoming more of a unified filling than in either alternative.

Like the sausage flavor, however, Cheesy Chorizo Scramble is likewise held back by how prominently its outer shell factors into its taste. It's genuinely fun to eat breakfast foods in a bite-size, dumpling-like form, but in none of these three cases does flavor overcome that fun, almost novelty factor.

Totino's sent me boxes of all three of its new Breakfast Snack Bites for the purpose of this review. The opinions in my reviews of each flavor are entirely my own.

In order to assess each breakfast bites variant, I baked them in the oven according to the cooking instructions on the side of each box. I chose to make them in the oven because I don't own an air fryer — an air fryer method, notably, is listed among three different cooking instructions — and because baking frozen foods in the oven almost always tastes better than heating them in the microwave.

During my primary tasting for this review, I baked 10 of each breakfast bite in one batch and ate them in the same sitting. I occasionally alternated flavors in order to best assess their strengths, weaknesses, and how they compare to one another. I had a few more of each flavor, heated in the oven again, the following day, and while I didn't approach that meal with the same critical eye, it helped reinforce my analyses of each flavor.