Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Review: Shaun White Monkey Bars Peanut Butter Chocolate Chewy Granola Bars


I've proven on many occasions on this blog that when I am purchasing items that the store, my reading comprehension is sometimes lacking.  Today's product is one of those instances as when I saw this box of Shaun White Monkey Bars Peanut Butter Chocolate Chewy Granola Bars (who knew the skateboarder made granola bars?!) in the store, I only noticed that it was peanut butter chocolate.  What I completely missed was that it also said it was made with real bananas.  Oops.  I guess I should have drawn the easy conclusion being that these are "Monkey Bars" but I didn't put two and two together.

I've said before that I can eat bananas, but I am not their biggest fan, so it sometimes skews my reviews.  So, in today's review, I think it is only fair to review this based on the flavor with the bananas and try to keep my prejudices out of it.  That way, banana people out there will know whether this is worth buying or not.  Anyway, I picked up this box of five for $2.00 at Kroger and each bar in the box is 1.2 ounces and has 140 calories with four grams of protein.



Obviously, based on the box, I had a decent idea of what these would look like once I took them out of the wrapper.  What I didn't have a decent idea of was how much these would smell like bananas.  It was an immediate and potent smell of banana as soon as I took this out of the wrapper.  Also, I will point out that the box may have bad ink or something because the bar was not nearly as dark colored in real life (compare my two pictures) as it was on the box.  Also, the box did not convey that this bar had a chocolate layer base to it, which was a pleasant surprise as I was expecting something that looked pretty much like a standard Quaker Chewy bar in that it was all granola bar mix.  Within that mix was the peanut butter and banana shaving mix, along with the typical oats, etc. that one would find in these chewy granola bars.

When I took my first bite...oh boy...it was a lot of banana.  So much banana, in fact, that I couldn't really taste the named ingredients.  I knew they were there because each impacted the texture of the bar as I chewed through it, but I couldn't detect their flavor all that well.  The chocolate, while it melted nicely and made this a bit gooey, only added a minimal amount of sweetness to each bite.  The peanut butter made this one sticky to chew through, but it was a basic and hearty peanut butter that didn't have a lot of flavor.  The rest of the bar was just chewy, as I'd expect, but this bar was all about the banana and like I said, there was a lot of it.

Buy It or Fly By It?  This bar gets two ratings.  The official rating, since it is based on me, is a FLY BY IT rating because there was just too much banana here.  The non-official rating, which I think applies to people that like bananas, is that this is probably worth a try.  The lack of peanut butter and chocolate flavor in this was disappointing, but if you are a big banana person, you'll probably love this bar.  Based on personal tastes though, I just couldn't get on board with that.  Either way, it's still beyond comical to me that a professional skateboarder now has his own line of granola bars.

FLY BY IT!!

1 comment:

  1. Thanks- this one made me laugh. Sorry about the bananas. I missed it on the box, too.

    ReplyDelete

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