Review: Love Grown Foods Peach Almond Vanilla Hot Oats

I love the clearance aisle.  I love it when I find products that I regularly buy and are near expiration (I'll eat them well before expiration) and I also love it when I find products that I would have either never considered buying or had never heard of.  Today's review is a case of the latter as I was able to find a 2.22 ounce container of this Love Grown Foods Peach Almond Vanilla Hot Oats at Kroger.  Can't really remember the price, but since it was on clearance, that's not a realistic gauge of price anyway.  Within this container are 240 calories and a respectable seven grams of protein.  It's also gluten free.

As you'd expect, this is a base of oatmeal.  No shocker there.  I will say that the oats are quite large, so that was different.  After that, let's just go in order of the ingredients listed in the name.  First, there were a lot of dried peaches in here and that surprised me.  You can see those in around the rim of the container in the picture above.  There were also quite a bit of tiny almond pieces, so that was a nice change of pace as well.  As for the vanilla, there really wasn't a ton of vanilla smell at all, so it's obvious that was supposed to come through on flavor.  There was also some brown sugar and cinnamon in here as well and they were somewhat noticeable in look since they made the oats look a bit dirtier, but they were also slightly noticeable in smell as I was able to pick that up a bit when I took a whiff of this.  Honestly, those two smells probably overpowered the vanilla.

My first spoonful of this did not really bring me a whole lot of flavor at all.  The texture was there as the tiny almond pieces brought nice crunch to this and the freeze-dried peaches brought some chewiness, but outside of that, there was a lot of flavor missing from this.  It was just bland.  There was some hint of brown sugar flavoring, but not a lot of hint of cinnamon or vanilla flavor.  The oats were of course boring, but a large part of the remainder of the container was boring as well.

Buy It or Fly By It?  I wanted to like this because the flavor description and visual presentation intrigued me.  Unfortunately, everything was just too weak, bland and boring, so I've got to give this a FLY BY IT rating.  I'm glad I found this at a reduced price in the clearance bin because had I paid full price for this and found it as bland, this review would have been a lot more negative and cynical.

FLY BY IT!!