Review: Nature's Bakery Stone Ground Whole Wheat Raspberry Fig Bar

After my last Nature's Bakery review, Nature's Bakery itself responded via my Twitter feed that I need to try out their vanilla raspberry bar and while this Nature's Bakery Stone Ground Whole Wheat Raspberry Fig Bar isn't exactly that, it is close and here we are with another review of one of their products.  Actually, I had already purchased this, so I planned on trying another flavor anyway, but it was nice of them to interact via Twitter and give me a (biased) recommendation.  This package, just like the last, is made up of two separate fig bars and the entire contents have a combined weight of 2.0 ounces.  Each  bar in the package is 110 calories and has two grams of protein.

Opening the wrapper, I was prepared for something that looked just like the last bar I reviewed and also looked like pretty much any fig bar product I've ever seen in my life.  That reminds me, is there like some sort of fig bar trade union or something that mandates that they all look basically the same.  For whatever reason, the fact that they all look nearly identical amuses me.  Anyway, this bar was the standard cereal bar exterior (whole wheat in this instance) with the fig and fruit filling.  One thing of note when I was looking at the ingredient list is that this filling is not called that at all...it's actually called a "paste."  Hmm.  What was even odder is what made up the raspberry paste...it was a combination of raspberry and also the juices of pineapple, pear, apple and/or peach.  What's with the "and/or" thing and why the heck was that on the ingredient list.  So bizarre.  The dense bar did have a slight smell of raspberry, so it at least smelled like it was supposed to and that was good.

Biting into this bar provided me with a whole lot of cereal bar and not a lot of paste.  Honestly, there was very little paste at all and that lack of paste made these extremely dry and crumbly.  What paste their was did have a nice blend of grainy fig and raspberry flavor with both tang and sweetness, but there was so little of it and so much of the cereal bar portion that I really couldn't address its taste a whole lot.  I like cereal bars just fine, but that's when there is enough filling that it moistens up the cereal portion and makes it an edible treat.  These bars just did not do that it and it was a doughy, dry and difficult to chew (because of its dryness) block of whole wheat cereal.

Buy It or Fly By It?  Had their been more "paste," my opinion of this bar would be different.  Instead, because of it's lack of paste, I have to give this a FLY BY IT rating.  What flavor there was in the bars was decent, but it was so poorly constructed via the cereal bar to paste ratio that I just didn't enjoy eating this.  If they tilted their ratios a bit more toward more paste, I think I'd have a different opinion.

FLY BY IT!!