Review: Muscle Milk Vanilla Almond Yogurt Protein Crunch Bar

Muscle Milk products tend to scare me, but as I mentioned in a prior review, I saw some of their bars in Kroger recently and when they were tagged with the "NEW" label, I knew I couldn't resist picking a couple up.  This Muscle Milk Vanilla Almond Yogurt Protein Crunch Bar is the second of that purchase and like the last, I got this for $1.99.  This beefy bar comes in at a robust 2.8 ounces and powerfully packs 350 calories and thirty grams of protein.  Nothing about this bar says diet...it all says muscle.  Kind of makes sense due to the manufacturer, eh?  Yeah, I'm pretty bright.

Taking this out of the wrapper presented a bar to me that looked nothing like what I expected based on the wrapper.  I expected something kind of artful and pillowy looking.  What I got something that was just mashed together, bulky and rock hard.  It smelled faintly of vanilla cream, but this certainly wasn't going to win any beauty contests.  As for the composition of the bar itself, it had a yogurt base topped with the usual heavy and dense protein soy crisp interior.  The bar was then topped with a vanilla cream frosting with a mix of small almond pieces scattered throughout.  They weren't shy with the almonds, which was nice, but they also weren't generous with them either.

Expecting this bar to nearly break my teeth even before I took my first bite, I made sure to attack this one with my molars first in hopes of preserving my teeth.  I did preserve my teeth, but this was so rock hard that I almost shattered my molars.  Not exactly a wonderful feeling and that continued as I tried to chew my way through this.  In terms of flavor, this bar did have a lot of vanilla and while that was fine, it certainly wasn't anything to write home about.  There was faint, if any, almond flavor and honestly, I couldn't tell if the almonds were adding crunch or not because this bar was so difficult to chew through in the first place.  I guess I could say that the cream topping tasted kind of like cream frosting, but again, it was so hard that it really just tasted stale and mostly boring.

Buy It or Fly By It?  I really can't say anything horribly bad about this bar, but I also can't say anything all that good about it either.  It was just boring, rock hard and not really my cup of tea, so it gets a FLY BY IT rating.  I could perhaps see a need for this if you were trying to build up bulk and muscle and needed a different flavor, but outside of that, this product is pretty much useless in my mind and it ultimately ended up being strange since it was so manufactured.

FLY BY IT!!