Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Review: thinkThin Chocolate Peanut Butter Toffee Protein + Fiber Bar


Thinking back to the beginning of this blog and how naive/dumb I am, I'm reminded of one of the misconceptions that I had when this blog first launched.  I believed that thinkThin products were available only in Kroger and were their store brand under a different name.  I don't know why I thought that, but that continued on for several reviews until I started seeing these pop up in different stores.  It was in one of those different stores (Marsh) that I picked up this new flavor and product line thinkThin Chocolate Peanut Butter Toffee Protein + Fiber Bar for $1.79.  It comes in at 1.76 ounces and has 180 calories and thirteen grams of protein.  As an aside, my uncle always brings toffee to our Christmas gatherings because he knows that none of us can keep our hands off of it.  It's the thought of that toffee that excites me every time I see a product with toffee in the name, so that correlation had me pretty excited about this one when it popped up on the shelf.



I don't know why, but prior to me opening up the wrapper on this bar, I was expecting something fancy and exquisite.  What I got (and you see above) is a pretty basic looking bar.  It has an outer casing of chocolate and within that chocolate casing is a protein mix of peanut butter, soy crisps and little bits of buttery toffee.  The bar itself smelled of peanut butter, although when I held it close to my nose, I could clearly smell those toffee pieces emanating their aroma out of the bar and when I mixed the smell of peanut butter and toffee into my brain, let's just say that I got quite a bit excited.

Maybe I got too excited and set myself up too much because once I took my first bite, I was immediately deflated.  Don't get me wrong, there was nothing wrong with the flavor of this, but I had such high and perhaps unreasonable expectations that I'm not sure any bar could have met those.  Anyway, the bar itself had a very soft and chewy texture to it and with each bite, the chocolate casing melted over the protein base interior.  The toffee and soy crisps in that interior added a bit of graininess and very moderate crunch to each bite, so that was a good way to break up the texture of an ultimately chewy bar.  In terms of the flavor, the peanut butter flavor is definitely present, but it isn't overly powerful.  It hits at the front end of each bite but then dissipates in the end as the toffee flavor arrives late with its buttery richness.  I actually quite enjoyed it.  The chocolate, while definitely present in terms of adding decadence with its melting qualities, didn't make itself too prevalent in terms of the flavor.  I could tell it was there and it was somehow contributing to the sweetness of this bar, but it didn't really stand out in any way.

Buy It or Fly By It?  Going into this, I was practically giddy because the combination of the three different components of this bar sounded like a fantastic idea on paper.  Unfortunately, ideas don't always play out as well as you'd like them to when you draw them out on paper and that is the case with this bar.  Like I said, this bar was a more than adequate and solid player and gets a BUY IT rating, but I think it might have fallen victim to unreasonable expectations from me.  If you see this on the shelf and want to check it out (and also keep your expectations at bay), I think there is a good chance that you'd enjoy this quite a bit.

BUY IT!!

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