Review: Balance Bar Bare Sweet & Salty Chocolate Almond Bar

Since I got a free shipment of these from Balance Bar, I've obviously covered a lot of flavors here on the blog in prior reviews.  The good news is that I've only got a few more flavors from that free shipment to review after this one, so I'm eventually going to run out.  Actually, that's not true because I'm guessing that Balance Bar will keep introducing new flavors as time goes on.  Anyway, this specific bar from that shipment is the Balance Bar Bare Sweet & Salty Chocolate Almond bar from their Bar line of bars.  It's the standard 1.76 ounces and it has 200 calories.  It also packs fifteen grams of protein and comes in a revealing clear wrapper.  Fancy.

Since this is a "Bare" bar, that obviously means that the bar is not completely covered in an outer coating and revealing the insides of the bar for the world to see makes it Bar.  See how I worked through that one in my head?  Yeah, I'm pretty smart.  Anyway, the bar consists of a chocolate coating layer that has an almost mocha like smell as the base and then is topped by the bar layer of rice crisp and granola.  Within this rice crisp and granola are several small almond pieces and it's all bound together by almond butter.

As I bit into this bar, I was met by a nice crunch of the bar and obviously that crunch was helped along by the small, but ample almond pieces.  The chocolate then added a mildly sweet creaminess to the crunch and when you mixed that semi-sweetness of the chocolate with the crunch of the rice crisp/nuts/granola, you obviously got the sweet and salty component of the bar.  It's not really a fifty/fifty split in sweet and salty as I'd say that the salty component of the bar takes up about 60% of the taste.  There's not much else to say here as this bar was basically an instance of what you see is what you get (helped by the clear packaging; ha!).

Buy It or Fly By It?  Personally, I would BUY IT.  It's inoffensive and a decent tasting bar, so you aren't going to regret purchasing it.  That said, it's kind of a boring bar, but sometimes boring is what a person needs as it can fulfill a primary need as a snack or a quick meal and this bar is certainly capable of that.  That said, if you are looking for something more sweet or more salty, you'd should probably look elsewhere because this bar does not really have either of those things in abundance.

BUY IT!!