Review: CLIF Kid Z Bar Iced Oatmeal Cookie Bar

I know I say this a lot now, but I'll spare the long intro again because it tires and just say that CLIF has a lot products and I've done a lot of reviews on them.  Trying their endless line of products leads me to another product from their Z Bar line of products aimed at kids with this review of the CLIF Kid Z Bar Iced Oatmeal Cookie Bar that I picked up at Kroger on sale for $0.75.  This organic bar is 1.27 ounces and has 130 calories and three grams of protein and particularly interests me because, on occasion, I would make the argument that oatmeal cookies are better than chocolate chip cookies.  I'm not saying that's always the case, but sometimes the wind blows me that particular way, so I was curious to see how this "cookie" related to the real thing.

The design of most CLIF bars is pretty basic and that's certainly the case with this bar.  The only thing that differentiates this bar from most CLIF products is the presence of the icing swirl on top of the long rectangular shaped bar.  The rest of the bar is made of the the typical organic oat mix and also includes some mix-in ingredients like cinnamon and much to my surprise, white chocolate chips!  The typical oatmeal cookie includes raisins, but this one included a surprising amount of white chocolate chips and being that I absolutely adore white chocolate, I was pretty excited by that.

Biting into this bar, it carries the texture of a typical CLIF bar in that it was soft and chewy.  The mix obviously tasted like oats, but that oat flavoring was amped up in this case since oats were the predominant flavor of the bar since it was modeled after the cookie instead of just the usual supporting actor that they usually are.  The cinnamon flavoring was definitely noticeable, but it was mild and being that this is a bar that is slanted toward kids, you probably don't want that flavoring to be too strong because it could turn some kids off.  The icing itself was pretty flavorless and I didn't really notice it.  The real star of this was the white chocolate chips and I was delighted by that.  Not only did they break up the soft chewy texture of the oat mix by providing the occasional pop, but once I bit into them, they melted quickly and provided a nice sweet, decadent taste to each bite that included them.

Buy It or Fly By It?  Had this been just an oatmeal cookie bar, it would have been just okay, but the presences of those white chocolate chips puts this strongly in the BUY IT category.  I thought I'd miss the raisins that I usually find in an oatmeal cookie, but I didn't miss them at all here.  I know most of these Z Bars are intentionally somewhat bland since CLIF is trying to go for the kids market, but this bar has enough flavor that it's even a good one for supposed adults like me.  Serve this to your kids, serve this to yourself, do whatever, but whomever eats it is going to enjoy it.

BUY IT!!