Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Review: Balance Bar Bare Blueberry Acai Bar



I interrupt this week's CLIF Bar week programming to essentially what could be considered a sponsored review.  Starting today, February 15th, Balance Bar is releasing a new product from their Bare line of bars (basically trail mix bars), the Blueberry Acai bar (no website for it yet).  You should be able to find these in stores officially next week, but Balance Bar shipped a box of these to me in advance in hopes that I would do a review for the site and being that the bar is being introduced to the press today, I wanted to make sure that I was able to get it out there pronto.  I would imagine this would cost roughly the same as a typical Balance Bar (around $1.00) and it weighs in at the Balance Bar standard of 1.76 ounces.  The bar contains 200 calories and 15 grams of protein.


As you can see, the Bare product line is essentially Balance's line of trail mix bars.  Kind of funny that this is going up today after I did a review yesterday of one of CLIF's Mojo line of trail mix bars.  I will admit that I did not plan that, but that it was a happy accident.  Anyway, the trail mix in this bar is made up of honey, granola, oats, sunflower seeds, acai juice and your typical rice crisp.  Also in the mix are raisin sized lumps of blueberries.  There's not a lot of blueberries, but they are definitely there.  This trail mix is then all piled on top of a vanilla yogurt icing base.  One thing that I did find particular interesting about this trail mix was how visible the oats and sunflower seeds were.  They were huge!  That's not a good or bad thing, but it is just something that I'm typically not used to.

In terms of taste, this one has both hits and misses.  The trail mix itself is delightful.  It's crunchy, but not in a hard, cracking kind of way.  It's more of a soft, chewy crunchy, if that makes any sense.  The blueberries bring a sweetness to the bar and I would argue that they are even too sweet when mixed with the acai juice. One way Balance tries to counteract this, I think, is by the vanilla yogurt icing and it does have a milky, cooling effect on the sweetness.  Unfortunately, that cooling effect is not enough as the sweetness and tartness of this bar continues to overpower its taste.  For a noted sweet freak like me to say something like that, you know that it has to be really powerful.  In all honesty, this bar would have worked better with peanut butter as the hearty quality of peanut butter would have done a much better job counteracting this sweetness/tartness than vanilla yogurt would have done.

Buy It or Fly By It?  I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, so to speak, since I got this for free, but I have to give this a FLY BY IT rating.  It's just too sweet/tart for my tastes.  Some people may find that appealing, but it just doesn't work for me.  It's too bad because I like most, if not all, of the Balance Bar products that I have had, but this one just doesn't do it for me.

FLY BY IT!!

3 comments:

  1. Peanut butter and blueberry doesn't seem like such a good combination. That would possibly work better if it was a strawberry goji bar with peanut butter. Hey balance bar if you're reading this you should definitely get on that;]

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nick, I know for a fact that they are reading, so maybe they will take that under advisement!

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    2. Hopefully they do. I like their peanut butter bare version and the addition of strawberry seems like it'd only make the bar even better.

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