Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Review: Rickland Orchards Apple & Honey Greek Yogurt Bar


It seems like everyone is trying to incorporate Greek yogurt into everything these days as if it's the new food fad like bacon was a couple years ago.  Because of that, there's an abundance of Greek yogurt related products hitting the market and today's review is of one of those products with this review of the Rickland Orchards Apple & Honey Greek Yogurt Bar.  Now I've reviewed Rickland Orchards products once before on the blog and liked it, so I went into this review with a positive attitude.  I picked up this bar at Meijer on sale for $1.25 and it is 1.41 ounces with 160 calories and seven grams of protein.  Hidden in small lettering underneath the flavor name of the bar is the phrase "+Honey Roasted Granola", so obviously this bar includes that as well.



Since this comes in a clear wrapper, there wasn't a big mystery as to what this bar looked like compared to some of the other bars that I unwrap that are in non-clear wrappers.  This bar starts off with a base layer of plain Greek yogurt and is then topped with a layer the "meat" of the bar.  In this "meat" is honey roasted granola, dried apple pieces, sizeable (and surprising) almond chunks and also the typical mix of rice crisps.  All of this is bound together by honey and various syrups and then the bar is topped by a designer-ish swirl of Greek yogurt icing.  The bar smells strongly of apples, although there is also a very slight hint of cinnamon and honey smell as well and being that those three mixed together are almost always good and when mixed with another one of my favorite things in the world (granola), I was anxious to dive in.

While I was anxious to dive in, the bar didn't quite deliver on my hope for it because I had built up so much hype in my head.  Don't get me wrong, this was a good tasting bar, but I think I gave it unreasonable expectations based on the flavor combination involved in the construction of the bar.  Expectations aside, this bar had a nice crunch due to the granola and when I encountered one of those aforementioned almond chunks, I was met with an additional pop of crunch as well and being that one of the reasons I love granola is because of its crunch, I certainly appreciated that crunchy aspect of the bar.  As for the taste of the bar itself, it had a strong apple taste and was accented at the very end of each chew with slight sweetness from honey and a little bit of "heat" from the cinnamon.  Being that apples and cinnamon always go together, the addition of honey made this an even more pleasurable combination.  The Greek yogurt, on the other hand, did not really have much flavor at all and it seemed its sole purpose was to provide a cooling effect to the apple, etc. taste.  That was fine because if this had the tart taste of typical Greek yogurt, I'm not sure it would have worked.

Buy It or Fly By It?  I had huge and unreasonable expectations going in, so when I dial those expectations down and look at this bar objectively, I find a bar that is strongly above average so it gets a BUY IT rating.  It's a time-tested flavor combination and with the addition of granola, it just puts this bar over the top and gives Rickland Orchards another tasty product.  Now, if they could only find a way to work chocolate into this bar, they'd have something incredible.  Oh well, can't win them all...

BUY IT!!

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