| Product: |
Fruit Bowl School Bars |
| Date: |
27/07/08 (40 review reads) |
| Rating: |
 |
Advantages: Low in calories
Disadvantages: High in sugar, awful taste
I have lately been trying to eat more healthily so I'm trying to swap some of my fatty and sugary sweets for more healthy ones. I came across these Fruit Bowl School Bars in Tesco's, they were in the kids snack section but I thought that I'd give them a try anyway because they looked nice and I liked their fruit flakes, I used to eat them a lot. The Fruit Bowl company is one of the many companies out there who has realised people are trying to be more healthy and is trying to make a bit of money out of it, that's fine by me as long as they make good healthy food.
Basically what they are is fruit puree, fruit juice and dried fruit which has been all squashed together to form a bar, or actually a stick. They're meant to be really good for you because they only contain natural colours and flavours and are really low in fat, with no added sugar. Each bar contains more than 5 times it's own weight in fruit, this sounded very appealing to me, very healthy. As an added extra they are, gluten free, dairy free and suitable for vegetarians.
You can buy these from a lot of Supermarkets but I got mine from Tesco's where they were only 71p for a packet of 5 bars. They come in a box that matches the colour of whatever fruit you have chosen. They come in:
Apricot
Cherry
Apple
Blackcurrant
Strawberry
Inside the colour coded box are the bars each individually wrapped. They're quite small about as wide as two pencils and only about 10cms long. They don't actually smell of anything much which surprised me. They look quite disgusting to be honest, you can really see that it's just a load of fruit that's been crammed together, to be honest I really didn't like the look of it but persevered anyway. The taste was almost as made as it looked. I tried all of the flavours, thinking, stupidly that each one would perhaps be better than the last but they were all terrible. They tasted very high in sugar yet also slightly plastic. I can't remember which flavour was the worst, they were all pretty bad. The only one that I half liked was the blackcurrant one because you could taste a bit of blackcurrant through the sugar.
To give you an idea of what they contain here are the ingredients and nutritional information for the blackcurrant flavour.
Ingredients:
Concentrated Apple Purée (an average of 222g of apple used to prepare 100g of school bars®), Dehydrated Apple (28%), Maltodextrin, Oligofructose, Vegetable Oil, Concentrated Blackcurrant Juice (1.5%), Apple Extract Concentrate (1.5%), Pear Juice Concentrate (1%), Gelling Agent (Pectin), Natural Colour (Anthocyanins), Natural Flavouring, Malic Acid, Preservative (Sulphur Dioxide)
Each serving (one stick) contains:
67 Calories (3% GDA)
9g of Sugar (10% GDA)
0.6g of Fat (1% GDA)
0.4g of Saturated Fat (2% GDA)
0.1g of Salt (2% GDA)
As you can see these contain a lot of sugar!
Overall I think that this is an awful product and only give it a 2 out of ten because they're cheap and the blackcurrant flavour wasn't that bad. I think the only reason they are popular with kids is that they contain a lot of sugar and taste very sweet.
Summary: Don't buy them, try some fruit instead
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