Review: Zone Perfect Kidz Caramel Crunch Bar

These Zone Perfect Kidz bars are a new entrant to my local grocery store's shelves.  I've already taken a look at one of these in a prior review and found it to be especially addicting.  Because of that, I was kind of excited to dive into today's review of this Zone Perfect Kidz Caramel Crunch Bar that I picked up on sale at Kroger for $1.00.  The bar itself is 1.23 ounces and has 140 calories with five grams of protein.  It's for kids obviously, so it's slightly diminutive, but that is just fine in the grand scheme of things.

This starts out with the standard granola bar appearance in that it's made up mostly of soy crisps.  Within those soy crisps are a healthy smattering of chocolate chips and pretzel chunks and then everything is bound together with peanut butter and very strong smelling caramel.  The bar is then topped with a "fancy" peanut butter swirl, so this one nails my three of my favorite flavors right off the bat in how it is composed.

When I took a bite of this, I was immediately met with the taste of dense, although not sweet, caramel.  That caramel then gave way to a not particularly sweet peanut butter that coated the granola/soy mix of the bar.  The chips and then pretzels added crunch, although it was alternately solid crunch (from the chips) and airy crunch from the pretzels and soy crisp mix.  The chips didn't have a lot of flavor, but they did add a melting quality that when mixed with the peanut butter coated the soy crisps and peanut butter to make it an almost gooey type of mouthfeel.  The star of the show though since it truly should have been since it was in the name ended up being the caramel and it just overwhelmed the entire thing.  I like caramel a lot, so I enjoyed that, but it could be too much for some people I'd imagine.

Buy It or Fly By It?  While this wasn't nearly as addicting as the last Kidz bar that I tried out, it was still quite good, so it gets a BUY IT rating.  The overpowering taste of caramel and the richness of this bar stops this from being addictive as that caramel would be too much if you ate these frequently.  That said, this is a more than sufficient occasional treat that could be enjoyed, especially if you love the combination of caramel, chocolate and peanut butter as I so truly do.

BUY IT!!