When you’re walking down the cereal aisle, there’s a way you can save big bucks by looking at one particular off-brand of cold cereal.

MOM Brands Co., formerly known as Malt-O-Meal, makes giant bags of cereals that are essentially knockoffs of popular brands. Their Tootie Fruities brand is similar to Froot Loops and their Honey Nut Scooters brand is a Cheerios impostor, to name just two examples.

Buying these cereals will save you between 20 and 25 percent off the national brands. Sales of MOM products are now booming with revenue closing in on $750 million, according to The Los Angeles Times.

So much in the world of cereal sales is driven by colorful advertising and cute characters on the boxes. If you or your kids are particularly brand driven, just save the box of your favorite national brand and put the MOM bag inside of it. Your kids will survive, I promise.

Back-to-school stock

Meanwhile, back-to-school season is upon us. I was in Target a week ago and noticed giant pencils pointing to back-to-school deals throughout the store. Then while in Walmart, I could hardly walk down the aisle because of all the back-to-school supplies.

Discount retailers are kind of desperate at this time. The recent loss of confidence in the economy means the registers have stopped ringing. So back-to-school merchandise is a deal right now since the season has been pushed forward several weeks. Meanwhile, summer goods are on deep clearance if you can still find what you want.

All of this means that delaying your back-to-school purchasing, if you can, will lead to better deals. The deep discounts are likely to happen before kids go back to school, particularly if you live where that’s not until after Labor Day.