Product: Kellogg's Fibre Plus (Milk Chocolate and Dark Chocolate with Almonds varieties)
Made By: Kellogg's
Price: £1.79 (multipack of 4)
Availability: Most supermarkets
Review By: chocadmin
I'm a big fan of Kellogg's convenient cereal products. I switched from having 'normal' cereal to chocolate pop tarts for breakfast many years ago. More recently - partly due to the decline in variety of pop tarts - I tried a number of cereal bars, Frosties, Coco Pops and a few others. They were ok but I always found the attempts to include 'milk' as part of the product a bit of a failure and ruined the taste for me.
So when coco rocks bars appeared I was very pleased. Here was a product that was low in calories, had a nice chocolatey taste and did just enough to keep me going till lunch time (and if not you could always have an extra one as a snack).
The above is really to show where I'm coming from when reviewing these new Fibre Plus bars that Kellogg's were kind enough to send me this week. There are two varieties a milk chocolate and a dark chocolate with almond. The main selling point is that these bars provide a whopping 20% rda of fibre! That's so much there's even a warning on the packet about increasing your fibre intake too fast (not sure I'd want to risk eating more than one of these a day - at least not for now).
The bars consist mostly of oats (20%) and chocolate (21%) which is drizzled over the top of the bar and forms a solid layer on the bottom (note significant risk of sticky fingers if the bottom of the packet gets warm or you hold it too long). They're weighty too, my beloved coco rocks bars are only 20g each, but these are 28g (also worth pointing out is that my coco rocks bars only have 0.3g of fibre, these have 5g!).
The weight and high fibre content means they feel particularly filling, and the taste is really rather good. The high chocolate content counts for a lot here and stops this high fibre product from tasting like similarly advertised products i.e. cardboard. I imagine it's not unlike what porridge would taste like if made with chocolate milk.
The chocolate itself, whilst not 'premium grade' is surprisingly palatable, particularly in the dark chocolate variety. The milk isn't as good but is by no means poor.
My only criticisms are that the calorie count is rather high compared to other products (milk-111, dark-116, coco rocks-82), this is due to the higher weight and I'd personally rather have a lighter product (physically and calorie wise) - particularly if this might be consumed as a snack as well as a breakfast 'replacement'. My other complaint is that they're sold in packets of 4, I've not seen these in the shops yet but I assume it means they're going to be pricier than other products (Kellogg's say £1.79 for 4) - maybe their pricing has cheaper childrens/smaller products (my coco rocks are 6 per pack for a similar price) and more expensive adult/bigger products but I'd rather it was more even.
These complaints aside the new fibre plus bars are really impressive. This is the kind of innovation I've been wanting in the chocolate market for quite a while and it seems that whilst the confectionery companies aren't up to taking any risks Kellogg's are. I'll get some more opinions from others with the bars Kellogg's have sent me over the next couple of days but so far everyone I know who has tried them has been impressed.
I'm intending to add this type of product to the chocolate review for your own review/voting purposes. Probably as a sub-category of regular bars (given their weight, and that they're sold with cereal not with chocolate).
For an alternative take on the dark variety check out Chocolate Review regular Cinabar's review at Foodstuff Finds
http://foodstufffinds.blogspot.com/2010/02/kelloggs-dark-chocolate-and-almond.htmlFor an alternative take on the milk variety check out Jim's chocolate mission at
http://tinyurl.com/yc895cqUPDATE: I gave some samples and bars to colleagues at work and everyone was pleased with the taste and thought they'd make a pretty good snack.
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