Review: Larabar Carrot Cake Food Bar

In my effort to get as many nutrition/protein/energy bars as possible on this blog, I'm now led to Larabar and their Carrot Cake flavored fruit & nut food bar.  They bill themselves as the original fruit and nut food bar, but since I'm too lazy to research those claims, I'll just take their word for it.  I picked this bar up on sale at Kroger for $1.00 and it has 200 calories with a minimal three grams of protein.  In terms of size, it clocks in on the small side of these energy bars at only 1.6 ounces.  Also, it's gluten and dairy free and while that doesn't mean anything to me since I don't have those allergies (thankfully), it means quite a bit to a lot of people out there.

As you you can see from the picture above, this one certainly isn't going to win any beauty contests.  It's texture is that of your typical, sticky energy bar mix and that's not all that surprising.  What I did find surprising is intentionally or otherwise (I'm sure it's intentional), they actually made this one look like a legitimate carrot cake, minus the the frosting of course.  Upon closer inspection, I could see several carrot chunks along with pieces of almonds, raisins and walnuts.  There were dates in there too, but I didn't notice that until I read the ingredient list.  Being that those things are typically in a carrot cake, Larabar was off to a good start in approximating this bar to its intended carrot cake target.

Well, the good start ended there because after my first bite, all I thought was that I wished I was eating a real carrot cake, even though I'm not all that huge of a fan of carrot cake.  The flavor was close to a carrot cake, but wasn't quite all the way there.  The energy mix did a decent job impersonating the "cake" mix, but the carrot taste was very, very faint.  In fact, had I not been concentrating on finding the taste, I would have not known it was there.  The one thing that saved this from being a less than average bar though was the presence of the nuts and fruits.  The nuts added a decent crunch (although the nut pieces were quite small) and the raisins and date added in a nice chew as this one was going through your mouth.

Buy It Or Fly By It?  FLY BY IT.  Without the presence of the nuts and fruits, this bar probably would have been awful.  Even with the nuts and fruits, this was only average at best, so stay away from this one.  There are plenty of other tasty bars out there that you could definitely choose.  Also, there will be more Larabar reviews coming, so I'm sure there are other tasty Larabar flavors that you could choose as well.

FLY BY IT!!