At the moment, I'm going through a stage where I need a little snack mid-morning just to get me through to lunch-time. Instead of reaching straight for the crisps and chocolate which I would find very easy, I have been buying boxes of cereal bars to take with me to work. This week's box is Alpen Fruit and Nut with Milk Chocolate. In the days where I didn't really eat breakfast, I used to grab one of these Alpen bars on the way to work instead. So, I decided to have a change from my usual Special K bars and stuck these on to this week's Tesco order, just to see if I still like them.

The multipack box contains five bars - it is a fairly flat cardboard box, not much wider than the bars themselves and an easy shape to fit into a cupboard. The bars themselves are in a brown package with the image of a mountain range as a background. The Alpen logo appears in white and there is an photographic image of a grape, a nut, a chunk of chocolate and an ear of wheat to the right of this.

On opening the package, the bar looks appetising. You can also smell the chocolate, which as a self-confessed chocoholic appeals to me. Visually, the bar has a tightly packed upper section of cereal, raisins and nuts, drizzled with milk chocolate and then a chocolate-covered base. It has a fairly firm texture - the first taste you get is the slightly crunchy taste of cereal and nuts, then the chewiness of the raisins and then the softer texture of the chocolate follows this. It is a combination that works well in my opinion - although there aren't enough nuts or raisins in the bar to mean that you get this combination in every mouthful. Sometimes you can't taste either the nuts or the fruit, so you just get the taste of cereal and chocolate which although it tastes good, isn't quite the same.

The main ingredients of this product are cereals (whole oats, rice, whole wheat), milk chocolate, raisins and roasted chopped hazelnuts and almonds. In terms of nutritional information, a 29g bar contains approximately 120 calories and 3.9g of fat. I think this makes it a relatively nutritious snack, although perhaps not something that I would eat every day. If you buy a single bar rather than one from a multipack, I think they are slightly bigger.

I paid £1.00 for a box of 5 x 29g bars - this was a special offer at Tesco and at 20p per bar I think they were very good value. The normal retail price for the box is £1.39 which again is reasonable value for five bars.

Overall, this is a product that I enjoyed and would buy again. The taste and texture were good and it fills me up enough to keep myself going until lunch. It is more of a mid-morning snack than a breakfast substitute but it is definitely one of those products which is useful to keep in your bag just in case you get hungry. The only reservation I would have about these bars is that I wish they contained a bit more fruit and nut, apart from that I think they are a good snack.