Review: Fiber One Trail Mix Chewy Bar

After having done so many reviews of Fiber One products in a short time period, I'm starting to get bored with them.  Still, like I have said dozens of times before on this blog, I'm trying to be comprehensive, so every time I see a new product in the store, I grab it so that I can do a review.  It's that quest that leads me to this review of the Fiber One Trail Mix Chewy Bar, which is apparently so new that it doesn't even have its own page on the Fiber One website yet.  A box of five of these bars set me back $3.00 at Meijer and each bar is 1.35 ounces with 130 calories and two grams of protein.  It's also 35% of your daily fiber intake, so it truly is my one for fiber (like that play on words?).

Visual aids on the packaging aside, this bar is pretty much like all the other Fiber One bars in general design with oats and puffed wheat cereal forming the primary components of the bar.  Within that oat/puffed wheat cereal mix are generally the flavor components of the bar and this time, those components include large semi-sweet chocolate chunks, slivers of raisins and dried cranberries (not at all like the picture on the packaging) and tiny, almost undetectable peanuts.  The bar held together by various syrups which make it sticky to the touch and then is topped with a decorative chocolate swirl.

Biting into this bar, it definitely hit the chewy part of the name dead-on.  In fact, it was so chewy that it had virtually no crunch whatsoever and was kind of just like a mix of one note in my mouth with occasional bursts of flavor.  Providing most of those bursts of flavor was the chocolate compoents of the bar with the chunks and icing swirl.  The chocolate was dense and heavy and not particularly sweet, but in the case of this bar, that worked particularly well.  Ordinarily, I prefer my chocolate to be of the very sweet variety, but this semi-sweet chocolate worked out very well and balanced out with the oats perfectly.  What didn't work all that well in this bar were the fruit components in the raisins and cranberries.  They were just slivers in the first place, so I wasn't expecting huge flavor, but I was at least expecting a fair amount of flavor.  Instead, what I got was minimal sweetness and tang from the fruit and that was disappointing because I was looking for that in my "trail mix" component of the bar.  As for the peanuts, they were an unknown and a no-show.  I would have expected them to at least bring an occasional crunch to the bar, but not only did they not bring that, they also did not bring any flavor.  The only crunch, if you can call it that, was brought by the delicious chocolate chunks.

Buy It or Fly By It?  It seems kind of strange that I've just written a paragraph mostly ripping this bar, yet I'm going to give it a BUY IT rating in the end.  I give it that rating because while this bar definitely had its shortcomings, the fact that the chocolate was delicious and worked nearly perfectly with the oat and puffed wheat cereal mix pushes this one over the edge to being appetizing.  The minimal tang and sweetness that the fruits provided, although disappointing overall, worked well with this to make it even more tasty.  With all of that said, I think this might the strangest review I've ever written...bash a bar, but then tell people to buy it.  All this fiber from these Fiber One bars must be causing me to lose my mind.

BUY IT!!