Review: Nature Valley Almond Crunch Roasted Nut Crunch Bars

I already went into a long, drawn out spiel about how I loved nuts.  It was a crude and ridiculous attempt at humor, so I'll spare going through that again.  It was armed with that pre-existing nut love that I decided to grab a box of six of these Nature Valley Almond Crunch Roasted Nut Crunch Bars Close off the shelves of Meijer for $2.50 to add to my growing Nature Valley review collection.  Each bar in the box is 1.2 ounces and has 190 calories and six grams of protein.  It's also gluten free, so that should apply to our gluten sensitive readers as well.  Judging by the number of people that I hear talking about how they are gluten free now, that's probably a pretty large portion of this blog's readership.

Clear wrapper and clear front of the box means that Nature Valley has left all of this out for the world to see.  Still, I'll give a brief description by saying that this bar was primarily large almonds, peanut halves and sunflower seeds.  They were all spread in abundance throughout the bar.  The bar was also quite sticky and upon reviewing the ingredients, I found that stickiness to be caused by corn syrup and not honey like I was hoping.  What was also notable about this bar was that it was extremely brittle.  Just trying to get this sticky bar out of the packaging caused it to break up, which is what led to the photo above.  The last observation here is that this bar smelled very nutty, which should of course come as no surprise.

Biting into this was an unsurprising experience in terms of texture.  It was crunchy but being that the nuts were so big and prevalent, there was some air between them since they don't all fit together nicely.  That made it an airy crunch.  In terms of flavor, this was all peanuts.  That's fine, but it just drives me batty when a product is named for one thing but another product completely overpowers it.  That's what happened with the almonds and peanuts in this bar.  That nutty flavor was also salty, but the saltiness was not too overpowering because this did have a sugary sweetness from it.  I thought that may be honey, but as my review of the ingredient list told me, that was not the case.  Instead, this sweetness came from the aforementioned corn syrup and also another ingredient from the list:  sugar.  Yep, sugar was listed alone.  That made me laugh for some reason and it also made this bar tasty in that it saved it from having too much salt.  The sunflower seeds in the mix added some grainy crunchy but were really hard to taste due to the peanuts.

Buy It or Fly By It?  Another bar that is a nut lovers delight and since I've already covered how I love nuts, this is a bar that I very much enjoyed.  That means BUY IT rating in my book and if you can find this on the shelves for a fair price, it is certainly worth a purchase.

BUY IT!!