Review: Kraft MilkBite Strawberry Milk & Granola Bar

These Kraft MilkBite bars are brilliant in their simplicity.  The pick one flavor, mix it with milk and that's it.  I've already touched on a couple of flavors previously, but as I also mentioned before, I picked up a couple of flavors at the same time and that leads me to this review of the Kraft MilkBite Strawberry Milk & Granola Bar.  Like the other, I picked this one up on sale at Meijer in a box of five bars on sale for $2.99.  Each bar is 1.23 ounces and has 140 calories and five grams of protein.  It's also a fifth of your daily calcium intake, so hooray for bone health!

Along with their simplicity in flavor choosing, these MilkBite bars are pretty simple in their construction as well and don't differ a whole lot from bar to bar.  The always present ingredients are the granola bar mix with large oat pieces that is bound together by honey and syrups and then "MilkBites," which are little pellets of milk that are hardened and resemble marshmallows.  The rest of the bar is also topped with a decorative icing swirl, which in this case happens to be vanilla and then includes whatever mix-in that the bar is named after.  This bar is named for strawberries, so naturally there are dried strawberries in the granola mix.  One thing in the granola mix that I did not expect and would not have every noticed had I not looked at the ingredients was the presence of dried cranberries. What the heck...where did that come from?  Strange, but I'll play along.  The bar smelled like a pleasing combination of strawberries and milk, so I was ready to dive in.

After my first chomp what I tasted was a prevalent milk taste with a slight hint of sweet and mild strawberry that was followed by an unexpected tang, although the sweetness could have been a by-product of the honey that was in the granola mix.  That tang clearly comes from the mystery cranberries and actually kind of overpowers the strawberry flavor in the bar.  It's odd that Kraft chose to name this bar after strawberries because they clearly are not the star of the show here in terms of the non-milk flavor.  It's cranberries all the way and honestly, the tang gets kind of strong.  It's not strong in a way that makes it unappealing, but it is strong in a way that it clearly announces its presence and authority, at least over the strawberries.  No matter what, it could not overpower the milk flavor and that's fine because the bar is predominantly milk and calcium focused, so that's the way it should be.  The granola is pretty much standard stuff just like the other bars, but it did provide an unexpected light crunch as I made my way through the bar. That's just the same as the others, but same or not, it is welcome.

Buy It or Fly By It?  Despite the fact that this is my least favorite of the MilkBite bars that I've had so far, it's still a fairly solid bar and for that reason, I give it a BUY IT rating.  Kraft could and has done better, but this is still a bar worth purchasing if you want that fruit flavor, especially a cranberry flavor.  If you are looking for strawberry, don't get your hopes up too high because you aren't going to get a whole lot of it here.

BUY IT!!