thinkGreen Peanut Butter Chocolate Bar Review

March 14, 2008

Tagline: “superfood nutrition bar for optimum vibrance.”

The package calls out that the bar contains over 1 tablespoon of power greens (power greens… huh?) and that it’s gluten free. It’s 1.76 oz (50g) and has 190 calories only 60 of which are from fat and also boasts 6g of protein. Neat.

A look at the ingredients definitely spikes some curiosity, and if you’re like me and you read those before biting into this bar, you might be scared away. They include all kinds of crazy things like spinach leaf powder, broccoli powder, carrot powder, beet juice powder, parsely leaf powder…? and the list goes on. Their website lists all of the bar’s commendable qualities such as its being gluten free, cholesterol free, trans fat free, high in protein, high in fiber and a great source of greens & vegetables… among a couple dozen other listed features. After studying the ingredients list on the Zone Perfect Bar, I was a bit scared of the term “chocolate coating” but should I just accept this as the protocol with nutrition bars? After all it didn’t taste bad there, so I’ll keep an open mind when tasting this bar as well.

My curiosity trumped the fright imposed by the packaging and the bar made it to my shopping cart. Shockingly despite the overwhelming amount of natural ingredients, the expiration date is 7 months away. Interesting.

Once the wrapper was opened, this bar disappeared very quickly. The bar is dense, but not too dense. The texture is pleasant (not too chewy, not too crunchy) which may sound like an easy feat, but if you’re a regular protein bar consumer like myself and don’t appreciate the effort it takes to tear off bite after bite of chewy power bars, you know this is a bit of an accomplishment. The texture is crumbly but not “gluten free” crumbly. If you’ve purchased other store-bought gluten free products in the past, you might understand this. If you don’t understand, consider yourself lucky.

This bar sat on a “raw foods” snack shelf in Whole Foods. I’m not into the whole raw foods thing, but it doesn’t deter me either. You wouldn’t know this was catering into special diet needs upon eating it. While it doesn’t have the hearty whole grain / nut concentrated flavor that lots of other protein bars have, it also doesn’t taste… well… gross like lots of special diet products do. This bar is definitely comparable to the Lara Bar which makes sense since the first ingredient in both bars is dates. Me and dates aren’t friends, but we aren’t enemies either. The Lara bar has so few ingredients that the dates often seem a bit too overwhelming in those, but here there are lots of other things to balance it out. A mixture of dates and raisins is the dominant flavor, but the chocolate is also very present, while the peanut butter chips bring some good flavor to the table as well, more in bursts.

It has 18g of sugar which is surprising because upon finishing it, I felt no sugar rush at all. Overall I feel good. I feel like I could run around and not feel like I have a brick of protein or chocolate & peanut butter in my stomach, which is a feeling protein bars sometime impose being so dense and/or sugar laden. It’s a satisfying snack and I feel that the tagline (“superfood nutrition bar for optimum vibrance”) proves very accurate.

This a bar that will make it into my grocery cart again.

I can’t give a direct link to them on thinkGreen’s official site, but you can buy them here.