Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Review: Good 'n Natural Peanut Butter Bar


As I do every week like the dork that I am, I was perusing through my local grocery ads for Marsh, Kroger and Meijer and when examining the Kroger ad, I found a new type of bar manufacturer that I had never seen before, Good 'n Natural.  Created in Sun Valley, Idaho (advertised on the packaging as), yet strangely manufactured in New York, these bars are gluten free, dairy free and vegan friendly.  It's also got fruits, nuts and seeds.  What a trifecta!

Their bars were on sale for $0.99, so since I'm "tight" (read:  cheap), I figured that price was right up my alley to head on over and buy some of these to give them a try.  Good 'n Natural has four flavors currently and I picked up several of them and for the purposes of my review series, I'll start off with this Peanut Butter flavor bar.  This one clocked in at a fairly robust two ounces and contained 230 calories and ten grams of protein.



When I took this out of the packaging, my first observation was that it was quite sticky.  After that, I noticed that the two ounce bar was quite robust/dense and had a strong scent of peanut butter (never a bad thing).  The bar also contained a protein mix consisting of peanut butter (DUH!), peanut and walnut pieces, oats, dried apples, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds and also maple syrup (part of the sticky quality).  Pretty much all of the ingredients were at least visible or noticeable to the touch.

Biting into this, it was quite soft and chewy.  I would say it was almost like a CLIF Bar in that respect.  The peanut and walnut pieces do add a nice additional crunch, but not enough of one to make this bar abandon its chewy quality.  What is weird is that for a bar that advertises itself as peanut butter flavor, you'd think that all you would taste would be peanut butter (especially after smelling it), but in reality, the peanut butter flavor does not hit you until the back end of the taste.  At the front end is the sweetness of the dried apples and then that is capped off with the hearty, but not sweet peanut butter flavor.  Outside of those two tastes, there's not a whole lot else going on here as this is pretty much just a basic flavor.

Buy It or Fly By It?  I'm going to give this bar a BUY IT rating.  It's certainly not the best bar I've ever had, but it is not a bad one either.  I would classify it as slightly above average and as I've learned after trying many of these bars for this blog, if you can get something that's not repulsive and has some appetizing qualities, you should not pass it up.  This Peanut Butter Good 'n Natural bar fits that bill, so it is worth a try.  I'll be interested to see if this quality carries on to the other flavors.

BUY IT!!

3 comments:

  1. These peanut butter bars are NOT gluten-free, despite the claims on the packaging. I had one for lunch today and have been suffering the symptoms of a gluten reaction (acid reflux, fever) for the last several hours.

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  2. I agree with the non gluten freeness. The package may say they are, but my body says otherwise. I was just googling to see if anyone else had a reaction to these bars

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  3. You may not have had the gluten-free version. Good n Natural also makes bars that are not advertised as gluten-free (and contain regular oats). I had originally thought that ALL of their products were gluten-free and was about to buy a box from drugstore.com when I noticed this. I am going to write to the company for more info.

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