Review: Kashi Ripe Strawberry Soft-Baked Cereal Bar

I love company snack time.  Not because I need a snack, but because I love picking up free stuff to review. Snack time and my propensity for free stuff leads me to another Kashi review with this review of the Kashi Ripe Strawberry Soft-Baked Cereal Bar.  Each bar is 1.2 ounces with 130 calories and two grams of protein.  Since I got this gratis, I couldn't tell you exactly  how much this is, but I'd guess a box of five or six of these carries a regular price at your local grocery store of around $4.00.

Being that this is a cereal bar and also being that I've reviewed many of these Kashi soft-baked cereal bars before, I pretty much knew what this one was going to look like and how it would be constructed. The bulk of the bar is the standard soft cereal bar mix and the interior is a strawberry filling.  The only thing that really differentiates these Kashi cereal bars from other cereal bars is that they split the top down the middle and let some of the filling be exposed to the world.  Also, one thing of note was that since this was technically a "ripe" strawberry bar, the red of the strawberry fillig wasn't the neon-ish red that comes in a lot of cereal bars, but instead a darker and deeper red like a real ripe strawberry would be.  Outside of that, the filling obviously smelled of strawberry and I can't believe I just spent an entire paragraph describing so basic.  Anyway...

Taking a bite into this, I can't say I was surprised either.  The cereal bar portion was soft, doughy and chewy.  One thing about this particular bar though was that it seemed uncharacteristically dry and especially so when you didn't get enough ripe strawberry filling into your bite.  The strawberry filling taste was pretty much classic strawberry flavor, although its flavor was fairly mild.  One thing that was sort of bizarre about this flavor of this bar was that it seemed like it was slightly off and I couldn't quite put my finger on it until I read the back of the wrapper and saw that apple powder was part of the ingredient mix.  Once I saw that and then took another bite, I could definitely tell that was the flavor that was making the flavor of the entire bar slightly odd.  It wasn't disgusting or bad, but it was distracting.

Buy It or Fly By It?  Despite the fact that I was distracted by the apple flavor, this bar was still tasty in general, so it gets a BUY IT rating.  It's not a world-beater and it's not going to knock your socks off with its flavor, but it is a good, all-natural bar to use as a snack or an extremely light meal.

BUY IT!!