Review: Quaker Chewy Dipps Peanut Butter Chocolate Granola Bar

It's funny how when companies run out of ideas for new product creations, they just take old ideas, slightly alter them and the re-package them as something else.  There's nothing wrong with it, but I just find it amusing.  A major offender of this is Quaker Oats and what they do with their Chewy bars of which I've eaten plenty.  The have the original Chewy bars, but then came up with a Dipps line of bars where they just took the original bars and covered them in chocolate...up until now.  It seems as if they've slightly altered that and taken one of their original bars and covered it in peanut butter coating and for the first time ever, have come out with a new bar called the Quaker Chewy Dipps Peanut Butter Chocolate Granola Bar (no full website for this "stealth" product yet).  Seeing that this was a first, I hurriedly snatched a box of six bars on sale at my local Meijer for $2.00.  Each bar in the box comes in at 1.09 ounces and contains 140 calories.

When I took this out of the box, I was pleasantly surprised to see what looked like an old friend...the Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Chewy bar with nearly an identical wrapper.  It was pretty obvious what Quaker was trying to do here as they took what some might consider as the best of their original Chewy bars (it is probably my favorite) and decided to cover it in peanut butter coating.  So, just a quick run through:  granola interior mixed with chocolate chips and then coated with peanut butter coating that has a semi-faint smell of peanut butter.  Not too exciting, but when you are basically just re-packaging an existing product.

I pretty much knew what to expect coming into this as I've had literally thousands of the Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Chewy bars in my life, but the only question here was how would the peanut butter coating affect the bar and I can't say it made a whole lot of difference.  Sure, it added an additional peanut butter flavor to the bar as the peanut butter coating itself was hearty and thick, but nothing about it was overwhelming.  I would even go so far as to say it was merely just an accent to the star of the show, which was clearly the original Chewy bar.  So, despite my intrigue and high hopes for this bar, it eventually just turned out to be an average product.

Buy It or Fly By It?  I struggle with this one.  Sure, it was a decent product and had a decent taste, but there was nothing about it that makes me want to say that I absolutely have to have one of these.  For that reason, I give it a FLY BY IT rating.  Also, when you consider this is just a slightly amped up version of the original bar and a box of six of these Dipps bars costs the same as a box of eight of the original bar, you are getting only a slight upgrade in taste while losing the presence of two bars in the process.  I call that a negative return on investment and being the prudent sort (not always), I tried to limit myself on those.

FLY BY IT!!