Review: LUNA Fiber Peanut Butter Strawberry Bar

LUNA bars have kind of a hit or miss history on this blog, which kind of fits along with their parent company CLIF, who has a similar history here..  I've found some of them to be bland and/or awful, while I've found others to be pretty darn good.  Hoping that this next bar, and the first one from their Fiber line, will be more of a hit, I picked up this LUNA Fiber Peanut Butter Strawberry Bar at Kroger on sale for $1.00.  It's a soft-baked fruit-filled bar, so it's got a lot of hyphens.  It's also fiber intensive with seven grams of fiber and comes in at 1.41 ounces with 120 calories and two grams of protein.

This is a soft-baked fruit-filled bar according to the wrapper, so that's what I expected when I opened this and that's definitely what this was.  What I didn't expect was that this bar was covered in sugar and the soft baked portion looked like a peanut butter cookie.  When they aren't dried out, peanut butter cookies are awesome, so being that this bar had that appearance, I was quite excited.  The fruit filling was typical fruit filling for any kind of bar, so there was no surprise there.  What was a surprise was the smell of the bar.  It was an odd amalgamation of peanut butter and strawberry.  If I had to pick one that was more predominant, I would say the peanut butter smell took the lead as this smelled somewhat like a peanut butter cookie.  Again, this is a good thing.  It was also quite soft, so going with the peanut butter cookie theme again, LUNA had something good going on here.

Biting into this, it was peanut butter cookie all the way right up until I swallowed and then the strawberry flavor hit. The sugar of course had it's sugary taste and the strawberry taste, what there was of it, had the familiar strawberry taste in that it was also mildly sweet.  The peanut butter flavor was neither sweet, nor salty, so it was just like...a peanut butter cookie!  Sense a recurring theme here?  It was also quite chewy, so they nailed the soft-baked portion of this too, so nice effort.

Buy It or Fly By It? Soft peanut butter cookie...sign me up.  Add fruit to a peanut butter cookie and you've got me more intrigued and this bar successfully provided both intrigue and very solid flavor, so it gets a BUY IT rating.  Based on the taste of this, I'm almost half tempted to try and baked a peanut butter cookie with the same premise of a fruit filling, but ultimately I'm too lazy to do that.  I think I'll just stick with this LUNA Fiber product, because it's a good one.

BUY IT!!