Review: Kellogg's Special K Protein Dark Chocolate Granola Bars

It must be new car season for Kellogg's and Special K.  Each of my recent trips to the grocery stores in my area have been overloaded with all sorts of Kellogg's products tagged with the "NEW" label.  To keep adding to the neverending catalog of previous Kellogg's reviews, today's review of these Kellogg's Special K Protein Dark Chocolate Granola Bars is one of those shiny new cars.  The question is, will this one have that wonderful new car smell (or taste)?  I guess we'll find out below.  As for the product itself, it came in a box of six on sale for $2.99 at Kroger.  Each bar is 0.95 ounces and has 110 calories and four grams of protein.  Now, I realize this is a snack bar and would indeed be smaller, but something that is marketing itself as part of the "Protein" line of bars has only four grams of protein?!  I just find that comical.

As expected, this pretty much looks like any Kellogg's granola bar that I've ever seen.  The bar is made up of a thick and strong smelling chocolate base topped by the typical granola mix.  On top of the bar is a decorative chocolate swirl and that's about it visually.  Other than that, I really had only one other observation and that was that this bar broken in half exceptionally easily, so I knew even prior to taking my first bite that this would be an extremely chewy bar.

After taking my first bite, I could confirm that it was extremely chewy and while I ordinarily prefer my snack bars to be crunchy, it's was nice to mix it up with a chewy bar for once.  In addition to that chewiness, the chocolate based provided an extremely thick and dense coating to each bite of granola.  Kind of fun.  In terms of flavor, I was legitimately shocked by this bar.  I say that because I was expecting this to taste like dark chocolate and lack any sort of sweetness whatsoever.  Instead, I was completely surprised.  This bar had a sweet tinge to it and after reading the ingredient list, it was no surprise why as the ingredient list included semi-sweet chocolate.  So, it appears as if you can classify this bar as yet another product that falls victim to the naming misnomer.  Instead of having a strong dark chocolate taste as the name would imply (and I dreaded going in), this bar tasted more like sweet chocolate and that was something that I particularly enjoyed.

Buy It or Fly By It?  Being that I just ended that last paragraph by saying that I enjoyed this bar, it obviously gets a BUY IT rating.  The naming misnomer of this product actually worked out to my benefit and I was very grateful for that.  Outside of that little snafu, this bar was pretty much standard granola bar stuff and there's nothing wrong with that, as it provided for an nice way to break up the day with a protein (insert sarcasm) snack.

BUY IT!!