Saturday, March 2, 2013

Review: Fiber One Oats & Strawberries Chewy Bar


A few months ago, Fiber One only had a sporadic presence on this blog.  Since then, there have been a ton of sales in my local store and now they've got a pretty extensive presence through various reviews that I've done.  It's another one of those sales that led me to pick up a box of five of these Fiber One Oats & Strawberries Chewy Bars at Kroger for $2.49.  Each bar is 1.4 ounces and contains 140 calories and two grams of protein and nine grams of fiber.  That's 35% of your daily fiber intake if you were wondering.



So, when I looked at the box and this bar, I figured that it would be oats and strawberries.  Would you think the same?  Well, if you did (and I did), you'd be wrong.  Upon reviewing the ingredients of this bar, I found out that the amply spread fruit chunks in the oat and rice crisp mix of this bar were not dried strawberries but they were in fact dried cranberries that were infused with strawberry flavor.  What the heck?!  Just when I think I've heard it all, something like this get sprung on me.  So, those strawberries...I mean cranberries...definitely at least smelled like strawberries, so the flavor infusion was obviously a smell infusion as well.  Wow, the miracles of modern science never cease to amaze.  The rest of the bar contained small almond chunks which I didn't even notice until I was reading that ingredient list again.  So, that's two unexpected ingredients in this bar, so it's just full of surprises.  To wrap it up though, the bar held together with honey for additional sweetness and is then topped with a decorative chocolate swirl for prettiness and additional flavor, I suppose.

As I took my first bite, I could definitely confirm that calling this a chewy bar was accurate as there was not really any sort of crunch in this bar, which means that the tiny almond bits did nothing for this other than add calories because I certainly couldn't taste them.  One thing that I could taste though were the strawberry flavored cranberries and their flavoring was strong.  What was interesting about this flavor was that while they carried the sweetness of strawberries, the aftertaste carried the tang of cranberries.  So, no matter how hard Fiber One may have tried, they ended up with a Frankenstein fruit that had two different flavors, which continuing the multiples theme, was interesting, fun and weird all at the same time.  Along with the almonds, another thing that was a no-show on flavor was the chocolate.  A lot of times, chocolate used in these bars is unsweetened chocolate and therefore has minimal flavor, but at least it provides a coating to each bite.  In the instance of this chocolate, even that coating was missing and the chocolate swirl on top of this was pretty much unnecessary.  Still, even without the chocolate or almonds providing flavor, the straw/cranberries provided enough flavor that this certainly wasn't lacking.[

Buy It or Fly By It?  Like I said, despite the fact that some of the ingredients were lacking, this bar as a whole was a pretty solid tasting bar and for that, it gets a BUY IT rating.  All the name of this bar really promised was the flavor of oats and strawberries and both of those things get delivered, so that's why I give this a positive rating despite the failures of the others.  That said, there are better options for bars out there, but if you end up with this one, you are going to end up with a solid experience.

BUY IT!!

1 comment:

  1. A "Frankenstein fruit"... so do you think maybe you've discovered what "Frankenberries" actually are?

    ReplyDelete

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