I suppose I could just Google this but that’s no fun. I very rarely buy breakfast cereal anymore. Do they still put toys in boxes of cereal? What was the last toy you remember getting? What was your favorite?
Not much.
Now its game codes or discounts for kid stuff.
I used to get the gift at my house. I couldn’t eat the sugary cereal so my Daddy gave me the consolation prize.
We had lots of cereal going thru the kitchen. I’m one of 7 siblings.
So I got a bunch of junk.
I particularly was fascinated with the weird cardboard 45 records. I don’t think any worked successfully.
I got a SWATCH watch once. I really liked that. Hit right at my middle school days. Very in style for that set.
I remember in cartoons they’d have the toy in the actual cereal bag. I remember any toys or promotional items would actually be taped to the side of the interior box.
During what era? In the 70s when I was in that target demographic, the toys were usually right there inside the waxed bag with the cereal, wrapped in their own little plastic bag.
I remember those. In my era they usually were plastic or vinyl embedded in the cereal box and you had to cut them out. I remember they usually worked, kinda. They were always scratched and skips were common.
They were usually at the bottom of the box. So we would open the box after getting home, and dig to the bottom of the box to retrieve the toy (to the annoyance of my mother).
I remember a small drum roller and ink pad. The roller had outlines shaped like human feet.
Formerly there was also a toy in the Crackerjack box.
That’s what I remember, though it would have been in an earlier era. The quality of the toys varied a lot. Some were disappointing, but some were pretty cool if your were ~6 years old! Sadly, I can’t remember specifically what any of them were. But I have vivid memories of some childhood Christmas presents – I guess those made a much bigger impression on me! 
And then one day I got the brilliant idea of opening the box from the other end… 
I had a Tony the Tiger bike reflector that I used for quite a few years (one of the more practical cereal box prizes I encountered as a kid). Similar to the one in the link below:
Probably the last “toy” I got in cereal was a penny in 1999. I never got the dollar, though.
All I remember is that the toys were always disappointing. Almost always some molded plastic made by the same people who made those little green plastic soldiers that sold by the hundred for about 50 cents. My mom cut off the sugar coated cereal supply when I was about 7 so that would have been about 1970. Cracker Jack toys were press-on tattoos half the time.
Here in Europe, the sugar+toy marketing niche is filled by the Kinder Egg.
My kids always enjoyed the little surprise, but then the toy would be abandoned within days if not hours.
The first episode of the 1970s UK sitcom The Good Life, which I think in America was called Good Neighbors, Tom Good is shown to be hating his job, where he works alongside his friend and next door neighbour Jerry Leadbetter at a firm that designs the surprise toys you get in cereal boxes. It’s the mind-numbingly dull nature of this job that makes him want to give it all up and be a self-sustaining farmer in suburbia.
Aaaaanyway… I remember getting the toys, which were most often poorly moulded figures of Cowboys on horseback.
I read an interview with someone who designed such toys for CRacker Jack. They had a model of a child human throat on their desk. Any toy or pieces of toys that could pass through were axed. Until, finally, they simply axed the entire idea of prizes in the box. I kinda miss them, though.
As for premiums in the box, I remember those from the 1960s, and collected several. The most interesting were the little comic books that came in boxes of Captain Crunch.
If you only know Captain Crunch from modern boxes of cereal and the tepid TV commercials, you have not experienced him. When the product first came out, Captain Crunch commercials were written by Jay Ward studios (Rocky and Bullwinkle, Dudley d-right, Fractured Fairly Tales etc.), with their characteristic humor. It seems almost certain that the Jay Ward people wrote the comic books, too, which had titles like “I’m Dreaming of a Wide Isthmus”
https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-cereal-insert-cap-crunch-4568463860
Sorta toyish: one of the chocolate cereals for a time printed train cars on the bottom few inches of their boxes. Cut them all out until you have a complete cardboard train!
I remember one of the cereal brands printed phonograph records on the back of the cereal box, though I don’t remember what was on the record.
Yeah, I recently rediscovered caramel corn. So I say “Hey, Cracker Jack!” I’m gonna buy a bunch, I used to love that stuff.
Oh! and prizes! Nope. Stickers.
There is a brand called Cretors that sells just caramel corn or caramel corn mixed with cheese corn. It’s addictive. I should not buy it.
The best prize I got was a toy car from Cap’n Crunch. Not just any car, but one that worked like the SSP Racers. You could pull the plastic stick to get the wheels moving, and it would go a decent distance. My teacher let me run it across the chalk tray of the blackboard, and it went all the way across.
I remember the little baking powder submarines that came in some cereal or other and had half a dozen or so.
I also had a collection of plastic airplanes that I liked a lot.
All of that sort of stuff disappeared when I went into the service. (I had younger brothers, and acquisitive cousins.)