Review: Appleways Chocolate Simply Wholesome Oatmeal Bar

Marsh is an interesting supermarket chain.  It's slowly rotting from the inside and dying, but it somehow manages to change its format constantly.  It brings in some of the most bizarre products from time to time and it also brings in stuff that seemingly no one else carries.  Today's review is of a product that I have not seen at ANY of my local grocery stores, but yet somehow has a pop-up aisle display at Marsh.  With that intro, I grabbed this Appleways Chocolate Simply Wholesome Oatmeal Bar for $1.49.  It's a product of Darlington Foods and comes in at 1.20 ounces with 130 calories and two grams of whole grain goodness (maybe).

As you can see from the photo above, this bar isn't particularly fascinating to look at.  It's actually pretty much just basic stuff.  It's an oatmeal bar that has a scattering of tiny chocolate chips mixed into the oat mix.  They were so tiny that I didn't even realize they were there until I was reading the ingredient list.  The bar is then topped with a chocolate swirl and that's about it.  It's also worth noting that this bar smelled both of chocolate (unsweetened, FYI) and also oats, so the named ingredients were present and accounted for.

As I took my first bite, my first observation was that the oat mix in this was fairly dry.  That shouldn't have particularly surprised me since oat bars tend to be a bit on the dry side by nature, but for some reason, it did surprise me.  What did help though was the chocolate chips and the chocolate swirl topping melting while this sat in the heat of my mouth because that melting chocolate added moisture to this bar and actually made it a heck of a lot easier to chew.  In terms of flavor, the chocolate chips (which brought nice occasional pop to each bite) and chocolate swirl were dense and seemed rich, despite the fact that they were made with unsweetened chocolate.  All in all, this tasted like I would have expected and that's a good thing.

Buy It or Fly By It?  When I first saw that this was a "Chocolate" bar and that's it, I will admit that I wasn't particularly excited by it...until I saw that there were chocolate chips in the oatmeal mix.  Those chips made this bar as they brought additional texture (crunch), additional moisture and more flavor.  Because of those chips, I can give this a BUY IT rating.  For such a basic combination, this one turned out to be fairly solid.  Now, I have no idea if you can find this anywhere, but if you can, it's might be worth picking up.

BUY IT!!