You’ve really got to hand it to General Mills’ Wheaties, the iconic cereal brand known for decades as “The Breakfast of Champions®,” which at the venerable age of 85 is still in the game, attempting to reinvent itself.

Last week, Wheaties unleashed a publicity blitz surrounding the introduction of a new variety that will join the original formulation on store shelves in September. To develop the latest “evolution” of Wheaties, the brand tapped an elite group of sports stars — Peyton Manning, triathlete Hunter Kemper, Kevin Garnett, gold medal-winning decathlete Bryan Clay and Albert Pujols — to work with food scientist and sports nutritionist Dr. John Ivy on a new cereal formula to boost athletic performance.

This group has narrowed the selection to three potential cereal formulas, and Wheaties has invited readers of Men’s Health magazine to aid in the final choice, which will be revealed, no doubt amid much fanfare, on Sept. 9, 2009 (09/09/09).

To further fuel excitement, the five famous athletes are currently appearing in a six-part Web series on www.wheaties.com/evolution that details the process behind the creation of the new Wheaties variety. The webisodes culminate in a trip to a General Mills plant in Minneapolis.

The potential new formulas are a lightly sweetened whole wheat flake with granola and crispy rice and a bit of cinnamon and honey, a lightly sweetened whole wheat flake with cinnamon clusters, and a lightly sweetened whole grain wheat and bran flake with fruit and almonds. While my personal preference would be to ditch any “lightly sweetened” product altogether, Wheaties’ push to create buzz about a product most consumers probably take for granted is admirable. May the best formulation win.