I’m no stranger to caffeinated products, such as mints, gum and chocolate. I used to commonly buy things like this over at ThinkGeek back in the day - Jolt Gum, Bawls Mints (now known as Bawls Buzz), etc. and chow down. So when I got a rather random email from the suspiciously named American Vending Systems asking if I wanted them to not only ship over a package of these Buzz Bite chocolates, but to also be paid for to review them, how could I say no (note, I have not received payment for this review).

So the package took no time at all to arrive, and when it did it came in a plain brown envelope with that little tin inside. No fuss. So let’s take a look at it. It’s about half the size of an Altoids tin, it has a bunch of buzzwords on the front that the caffeine market likes to use - caffeine, B vitamins, ginseng, taurine. 1 of these chocolates is the same as one cup of what I would assume to be coffee. “SERIOUSLY CAFFEINATED”, and so on. The back is a little more scientific, the many, many ingredients are crammed on along with the nutrition facts, a little bit of information about these, a company address and another picture showing that one chew = 1.25 energy drinks.

There doesn’t seem to be any small print anywhere saying “actually we lied, there’s hardly any caffeine” so I guess I’ll take their word for it and just eat these one at a time, rather than eat six and die of a heart attack. Now opening the tin there are six of these small square chocolates inside, let’s take a look.

Again, they make it clear to use that one chocolate is the same as one cup (of coffee). Opening the wrapper, which incidentally takes a while as the chocolate likes to stick to the entire thing and peel off it reluctantly, and here we have our little cube. Very soft and sticky, it smells more chocolatey than chocolate (5th Avenue time, baby), which made me look at the ingredients with more detail. Hmm, cocoa powder is below water in the ingredients, ok…great.

I don’t think anyone buys these for the great taste anyway. Popping it in the mouth and ho boy, not sweet at all but…bitter? Tangy? Goodness gracious what a weird sensation, my taste buds could barely handle what was going on here and so I looked at the ingredients again. So we have sugar and salt, the cocoa powder, caffeine, plus all the other buzzwords and that has created…well, a buzz bite. These are certainly chewy as well, there’s not much substance to these as they become very soft and chewy within seconds of entering your mouth.

The taste was just…bad. My keen readers may know that I weight lift (just to keep fit), and this reminds me of chocolate flavoured Whey Protein, chocolatey maybe but no one’s fooled and no one likes it, just a flavour that you can put up with. There’s too much going on here for my liking. I’ve cut down on my caffeine intake almost entirely since University finished though, and just one of these squares gave me noticeably more energy, my leg was involuntarily twitching and I had an insatiable urge to run around outside and start bouncing on a trampoline, so evidently, these worked for me but it depends how immune you are to the effects of caffeine.

P.S. Each chew contains 100mg of caffeine which is approximately the same as one cup of coffee, taking in 600mg at once would be extremely unhealthy and I do not endorse it.