Review: Life Choice Chocolate Fudge Brownie Energy Bar

Snack time is a wonderful and entertaining time at the office for me.  My desk is near the break room, so when 3:00 p.m. rolls around, I'm always amused by the stampede of people that go rushing in there to get their afternoon fill of food.  Now, I'm not going to lie and pretend that I am above that have never partaken because that would be a total lie.  Several of those snacks have led to reviews on this blog and another one of those snacks leads to today's review of Life Choice Chocolate Fudge Brownie Energy Bar.  This is a bar that I had never seen before (it's a Walmart exclusive), so I definitely snatched one up for review purposes.  This comes in at 1.94 ounces, has 230 calories and also eight grams of protein.

Being that I've never seen a Life Choice bar before, I wasn't sure what to expect as I unwrapped this thing.  Granted, there was a picture of it on the wrapper, but like fast food menus, the pictures don't always show a true representation of the product.  In the case of this bar, the glamour shot on the wrapper was just a fair representation of this bar.  The bar itself was encased in chocolate and since it was supposed to be fudge, that layer was quite thick.  The interior was going for the brownie motif as it had the resemblance of a doughy, baked brownie.  When I reviewed the ingredient list though, I was surprised to find that this "brownie" included an ample amount of ingredients that you'd typically find in granola, such as oats.  When you look closely, pieces of raw oats are what those little white pieces in the picture actually are.  The rest of the mixture also included tiny little chocolate chips, but those were somewhat difficult to smell.  All in all, this definitely did smell like a fudgy brownie, so they at least named the product right according to its smell.

While it may have smelled like a brownie, it certainly didn't taste like a brownie.  In fact, it tasted like dried oats mixed with some chocolate flavoring.  I certainly was not expecting that.  Now, the chocolate flavor itself was dense, sweet and melted in my mouth, so that was nice, but the overall feel of this was just odd.  It was as if I was just chewing on dry oats the entire time, which not only made it tough to chew, but also made it quite weird.  There was no real crunchy aspect in here unless you came across one of the tiny chocolate chips, but those weren't enough to make this anything other than bar that that was basically compacted oatmeal.  So strange, especially since it looked so doughy and brownie-like to the naked eye.

Buy It or Fly By It?  I very much love oats, but the oddness of the oat concoction in this bar just didn't do anything for me.  Plus, it seemed like I was laboring to just eat this bar and anything that makes me work to eat it better be pretty darn good.  In this instance, it was no better than just okay, so that combined with the effort that it took to eat this bar give it a FLY BY IT rating to me.  Not even the nice chocolate flavor could save this and that is saying something because nice chocolate flavor usually saves everything.

BUY IT!!