Review: Zone Perfect Perfectly Simple Toasted Coconut Nutrition Bar

One of the funny things about writing reviews for this blog is that often after I post a review, I hear from the company that was the source of the review with them offering to send me free products, information, etc.  Whether they are just being nice or attempting to buy me off is open to interpretation, but that's a discussion for another day.  It's after a previous review of Zone Perfect's Perfectly Simple products that Zone Perfect contacted me and offered to send me a couple of free samples in that product line to try out, so that leads me to this review of the Zone Perfect Perfectly Simple Toasted Coconut Nutrition Bar.  This one comes in at 1.58 ounces and has 200 calories with ten grams of protein.  It has only eight ingredients, thus the focus on simplicity in the name of the product line.

When I flipped the bar over and looked at the short list of eight ingredients, there were some on there that I knew (a couple of syrups, date paste, toasted coconut, roasted almonds and natural vanilla flavoring) and some that I have no idea what they are (soy protein isolate, whey protein isolate) but that seem to pop up in these nutrition bars all the time as a way to bring the "nutrition."  As for the bar itself, it was primarily composed of the date paste mixture that made it look similar to a standard Larabar.  Within the date paste were shredded pieces of toasted coconut and decent sized almond halves.  In terms of its smell, this bar smelled strongly of coconut and being that I've grown fond of coconut, I very much appreciated that.

Being that the star of the show in this bar was the coconuts, that was the flavor that I was looking for the most and it delivered.  Funny thing was that the coconut flavor did not deliver until the aftertaste of each bite, but when it did deliver it was a medium-to-strong coconut flavor with a hint of sweetness at the end.  The shredded coconuts also added a bit of a textural difference to the date paste which was soft and chewy, yet somewhat grainy.  What made this bar fun to bite through though was the almond halves as they added the occasional crunchy pop with a slight hint of almond flavoring.  Without that fun pop of the almond halves, this would have been extremely boring, but those halves broke up would could have been a monotonous chew.

Buy It or Fly By It?  While I didn't particularly care for the graininess of this bar, I appreciated the flavor of it over all and thereby give this one a BUY IT rating.  The coconut flavor was pleasing and the almonds provided a little bit of "fun" to the chew, so this one is a perfectly simple winner on my scorecard.

BUY IT!!