Review: Bear Naked Almond Cranberry Real Nut Energy Bar

My first experience with Bear Naked bars was a positive one that I found to be particularly enjoyable.  It was with those high expectations that I headed into my next round of reviews of their products as I was able to pick this Bear Naked Almond Cranberry Real Nut Energy Bar at the "weird" Kroger along with the others for $1.25.  This bar comes in at 2.0 ounces and has 250 calories with eight grams of protein.  It's all natural too, so that's delightful was well, I suppose.

As you can see from the photo above, this bar is a mix of pretty much everything that Bear Naked promised.  There's a plethora of dried cranberries and moderate sized almonds spread throughout the oat mix.  Also spread in there for additional enjoyment are little bits of peanut, honey, sea salt and almond butter.  Since this is a "Real Nut Energy Bar", I don't think it would be too much of a leap for me to say that I'm very happy that there were a plethora of "real" nuts spread throughout the bar itself.  As for the other characteristics of the bar, it had a strong scent of "butter", which I would guess would specifically be the almond butter since that was in the ingredient list and it was also quite stick to hold, which I would imagine comes from the honey that was listed in the ingredients of the bar.  Like how I mixed by excellent reading skills with my excellent observation skills there?  Yep, I'm pretty much a savant when it comes to that kind of stuff...or something.

As I bit into this, my first observation was that this was soft and chewy and being that this bar carries somewhat similar characteristics to a CLIF bar, I wasn't really all that surprised by that and I welcomed it.  Even though I am a professed crunchy food lover, sometimes something soft and chewy is all I really want and this bar had that.  If I did want crunch, all I had to do was look for the peanut and almond pieces that were spread throughout the chewy bar as they alternately brought some grainy crunch (peanuts) and occasional pop (almonds).  Outside of the texture, the most noticeable taste of this bar was that of the nutty almond butter.  I say it was the almond butter, because the flavor wasn't quite peanut and it wasn't quite full-fledged almond.  It was an amalgamation (like that word?) of all sorts of nut flavors and while it was probably somewhat sweet on its own, it was helped on a bit by the presence of the honey in the mix of the bar.  What was suspiciously absent, well, almost absent, was the taste of the dried cranberries.  They did bring some occasional soft chewiness, but they didn't bring a lot of the flavor that I've come to expect from dried cranberries and I've got to say that sort of disappointed me.  Not enough to turn me off of the bar, but the lack of presence of that flavor (it only showed up in the aftertaste really and it was quite faint tang when doing so) was somewhat of a let down for me.

Buy It or Fly By It?  While the lack of cranberry flavor did disappoint me a bit, that did not mean that this was not a tasty bar.  It lacked the kind of flavor punch that I was expecting going in, but it still had enough flavor (especially nutty flavor) to make this a tasty treat and for that, I'll eagerly give it a BUY IT rating.  Like I said, the cranberry flavor could pack more pop if they were to re-do this bar (perhaps I just got a tame bar?), but all in all, this is one that I think pretty much anyone would be satisfied with if they were to grab it off the shelf.

BUY IT!!