Monday, January 16, 2012

Review: Odwalla Choco-walla Food Bar



Wandering through my nutrition bar aisle at Meijer a few days ago, I came across a new nutrition bar manufacturer that I had never seen before.  Being that I want to review as many different things as possible, I decided to pick up this Odwalla Choco-walla food bar and give it a shot.  Odwalla bills this as their original food bar and also proclaims on the packaging that it is a "nourishing food bar" (I know I'm obsessed with packaging claims), so my review was going to put that to the test.  This one cost me $1.15 (on sale) and weighs in at 2.0 ounces, contains 210 calories and four grams of protein.



As I took this out of the packaging, the first thing I noticed was the strong smell of chocolate and since chocolate is awesome, that is NEVER a bad smell.  After that, I thought to myself that this bar was pretty darn close in texture to a CLIF Kid Z bar or a regular CLIF bar as it seems to be primarily made of oats and cereal grains.  Other than the comparison to CLIF, there really isn't a whole lot more going on with this bar.  There are some chocolate chips spread throughout the mix and those chips were actually quite large (compared to the bar), so that was something that was unexpected and quite nice.

Biting into this bar, I expected its texture to be similar to CLIF bars as I expected it to be very soft and mushy.  Shockingly, this one was a bit harder to chew and actually had a nice crunch to it when you encountered the chocolate chips.  I like CLIF bars and their texture, but having an occasional crunch to break up the monotony of chew is always nice and this Choco-walla bar had that.  Unfortunately, one thing it did not have was a strong chocolate flavor to match the strong smell.  In fact, the chocolate taste was neither sweet or strong...it was just flat.  That was a total disappointment considering that I expected this bar to be chocolate heaven when I opened the package and smelled the strong scent.  The bar is also a bit dry and that makes it difficult to chew after a while and requires a little liquid to lubricate your mouth to get it down.  Definitely not something that someone would find appealing.

Buy It or Fly By It?  FLY BY IT.  There was nothing horribly wrong with this bar, but there was nothing wonderfully right with it either.  It was just a boring bar that could potentially quench a mid-day hunger pang.  Other than that, it had no redeeming value.  I suppose it was an okay start for Odwalla being that it was their original bar, but one has to think that they'd get better with successive bars, right?  Since these were on sale when I bought them, I did buy several other flavors, so I'll put some of the other flavors to the test in the future to see if there were any improvements.  There has to be some reason they are in business, right?

FLY BY IT!!

2 comments:

  1. Truth be told, I love these. Plenty of chocolate chips, plenty of chocolate flavor in the bar. While I concede it is a little dry, I do drink it with a glass of water or coffee, helping get the first glass of water down in the morning.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True. They always do recommend that you down a bunch of water with these. I rarely do though because I often foolishly think I'm smarter than the label and it doesn't apply to me.

      Thanks for the comment, by the way!

      Delete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...