Cascadian Farm is on the brink of entering the Quaker zone for me. By that, I mean that I've been finding so many varieties of their granola bar products that this blog is going to become Cascadian Farm heavy. Since I found another flavor on sale at Kroger recently, I figure now is as good of a time as any to review this box of six Cascadian Farm Organic Harvest Berry Chewy Granola Bars that I got on sale for $2.49. Each of this six bars is 130 calories and has a tiny two grams of protein. One thing I noticed and found particularly impressive when I was looking at the nutritional information was that of the 130 calories in this bar, only 15 of them were from fat. I forget what the "healthy" fat ratio is (and I'm too lazy to look it up), but I do know the ratio in this bar is substantially better than the normal "safe" ratio.
As you can see, this looks like any other garden variety chewy granola bar. Large oat pieces, rice crisp mix and also the mix-in(s) of choice in a tightly wrapped package. What you can't see in this picture is that this bar was extremely sticky. That's just an observation though. As for the mix-ins in this bar, they are obviously berries since this is a Harvest Berry bar. The berries in this instance were cranberries, blueberries and grapes (raisins). They all smelled sweet and especially tangy (not sure you can smell tang, but it is one of those things that when you smell it, your brain automatically correlates it to tang).
After my first bite, it was clear that the use of the word chewy in the product name was appropriate as this one was extremely chewy and had no real crunch at all. It was primarily a grainy or sandy chew due to the granola and also quite sticky due to the syrups holding the bar together, but that was occasionally broken up by the ample amounts of dried fruits. While I didn't feel that any of them were individually identifiable, they all did work together to provide an initial hit of sweetness that lingered in my mouth and eventually turned to tanginess by the time I was finished with my bite. It was that sweetness and tang that gave this bar some life and actually, in a way, made it seem fresh tasting, although it clearly had no freshness to it at all since it was a pre-packaged product. One interesting thing is that after the tang, each bite had kind of a vanilla aftertaste, so that was fun too. Regardless, if you can come up with a flavor capable of achieving that ruse, you've got a winner in my book.
Buy It or Fly By It? I think I spoiled this decision with the last sentence of the previous paragraph, so I'll dispense with the build-up and just say BUY IT, but make sure you have some fluid nearby because this one will stick to your teeth and need to be washed out. This was another successful product by Cascadian Farm and I can quickly feel myself becoming more and more of a fan of their products.
BUY IT!! |
The Cascadian Farm Oats & Honey Cereal disappeared off the market for almost a year. During that time, they must have been in consultation with Big Agra, because it reappeared as Wheat & Honey. It is all wheat, yet the label doesn't list it. It now tastes like straw, previously it was the yummiest cereal on the planet. Big Agra must have convinced them that humans can't taste the difference between wheat and oats. I sprinkled mine in the garden for the birds.
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