Nutri(ish) Grain(y) Blackberry (flavoured) and Apple (vaguely) (Kelloggs Nutri-Grain Soft Bake Blackberry and Apple)

Member Name: mattygroves10

Product:	Kelloggs Nutri-Grain Soft Bake Blackberry and Apple
Date:	12/01/09 (283 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Quick, tasty, not too calorific

Disadvantages: LOADS of sugar, a little bitter, Expensive for what it is

Until a couple of years ago, I rarely ate breakfast (unless it was a dirty great bacon sarnie after a night on the tiles). It turns out that eating breakfast is an important part of your daily diet if you are calorie counting (as breakfast keeps you from getting so hungry you're ready to eat a horse at lunchtime). In fact, people who eat a regular healthy breakfast tend to be slimmer than those who don't. Ideally, of course, breakfast should be a meal - cereal, or toast eaten at a table at leisure. In reality, breakfast on weekdays is often eaten on the run, or at least at my desk. Though not the ideal start to the day, breakfast bars such as Kellogg's Nutri-Grain Soft Bake Bars can serve as a quick and easy breakfast choice.

The Nutri-Grain Bars come in a number of flavours (my personal favourite is the blueberry), but I have eaten this morning the Blackberry and Apple variety. Whilst I no longer obsessively calorie count (but should start again, I think), I do still look at the calorie content of the foods I eat. These bars are not the lowest calorie option around, containing 131 calories per bar. Not too bad as a breakfast, though a bit high as a snack. They do have a fair amount of sugar though (not unexpected given the fruit content and indeed the sweetening in the cereal surround) at 12g. In addition to the fruit, these contain sugar, glucose, honey, dextrose, maltodextrine - all forms of sugar. The cereal coating is fortified with vitamins and minerals, as is typical for breakfast cereals. It also contains calcium, a fact heralded on the packaging.

So you now know that although sweet, these aren't the worst option for breakfast. All of this is irrelevant, however, if they taste vile. Fortunately, they don't. The cereal coating is soft and chewy (some cereal bars have a far crunchier exterior), and the fruit filling is somewhat jam-like (not quite as sticky). The fruit filling is ostensibly blackberry and apple; to me, they taste very sweet but with a very slight bitter aftertaste - almost as if they were made from black currant, rather than blackberry (though according to the ingredients, they contain no black currant). The actual fruit content is low (as you might expect) - apple puree makes up 4.5% and blackberry puree (both from concentrate) 2.5%. So it's not surprising that these don't really taste like blackberry jam! The filling content is reasonable - not having measured, I'd say the filling makes up around a quarter of the bar (just from looking though!) The filling tastes not dissimilar to the filling you find in pop tarts or jammy dodgers, though perhaps slightly less sweet. This variety is not my favourite - I really cannot taste blackberry (or, if it comes to that, apple) - it's more a generic purple fruit taste, if that makes sense.

Here's the thing. It really is subjective. I was disappointed with this flavour. My 17 year old daughter, on the other hand, loves it. It's easily her favourite, and she can get through two or more a day (might explain why she has fillings and I don't).

I buy these in multi-packs, eating one for breakfast each morning. At Tesco they currently cost £1.93 for eight bars. If you buy them singly in newsagents, you'll pay around 35p per par. So they are not the cheapest nor healthiest breakfast out there, but for someone watching her calories, eating on the run, there are worse ways to break your fast (like Pop-Tarts - scalding jam in sweetened pastry anyone?!)

Therefore, recommended with reservations.

Summary: One of the tastier breakfast bars out there, but not my favourite variety, and rather sugar laden