Candy Review: Sweetriot UnBar

Monday, June 15, 2009 - by Linda

I swear, I try not to be the Candy Curmudgeon, so this is not going to be a rant about the packaging of the Sweetriot UnBar, or its silly name. You know if you are the kind of person who is annoyed by puns and wants to poke someone in the eye when you hear the word “yummy.” If you are, you might want to just grab one of these and rip it open without looking too closely.

But you might indeed want to grab one of these, either way. Sweetriot’s sense of humor might be annoying but this chocolate definitely was not. If there isn’t an old cliche that says that you should not judge a candy by its cover, there should be.

This chocolate was good, but different. The difference isn’t just the shape – a thick square made of four-subsquares, it’s not your typical bar shape, hence the silly “UnBar” name, I assume. The weird thing about it is that it reminded me of the flavor of chocolate cake frosting, more than a dark chocolate bar – but in a good way: like, I liked it even though I don’t like to eat plain gobs of frosting. I wasn’t sure this made sense as a description, but my tasting assistant agreed immediately.

There is cocoa powder in the ingredients, which I’ve never seen in a chocolate bar before – maybe that’s part of it? Whatever the reason, it was a good thing, different in a good way. And what’s more, few chocolate frostings are actually as good as this, with such a quality dark chocolate flavor.

The texture is also softer than the usual dark chocolate bar, although it was definitely not like frosting, which would be a nasty mess. But as thick as these little squares are, it’s a good thing that the texture is a little more like milk chocolate than your usual hard, snappy dark. As a contrast to the softness, they’re also filled with crunchy little cocoa nibs.

There are two flavors, one which just has the cocoa nibs (I am not, NOT, I swear, going to complain about them calling these crunchy cacao “peaces”) and another which has nibs and raisins. There are many foods in which raisins offend me – I will pick them out one by one from an apple strudel – but I am a big fan of chocolate-covered raisins, and raisins are one of the few toppings with which I will sully a bowl of chocolate ice cream. So as you can imagine, I was happy with this; you can no doubt judge for yourself which flavor to try.

I do have to take one issue with the packaging, which is the part that it says it’s ‘low calorie’ – which is to say, if you only eat one square of the four in one ‘UnBar’, it’s only 45 calories. Uh, yeah. If you only eat one bite of chocolate it is lower calorie than eating four bites, no matter what kind of chocolate it is; and, like anyone is going to rip open the non-recloseable package and not eat the whole thing. Chocolate is not low calorie, nor should you eat it because you are looking for an antioxidant health food – don’t get me started. But, people: it doesn’t NEED to be. Chocolate is perfect at its real job, which is being a pure source of pleasure, and this one is definitely worth a try.

• Sweetriot Website