I figured I should put my advance release of these two bars to good use by actually reviewing them before you, the general public, got to taste these, also it makes me sound like a VIP or something which doesn’t happen often. This and the Apricot Crunch bar are being released in order to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Fruit & Nut bar, and hence we have “fancy” bars “designed to tickle a new generation of taste buds.” A choxology team (best job title ever) with the help of ’super’ tasters (people with the special ability to detect very small differences between tastes) worked to create these bars. How about that for some awesome sounding PR?

So I covered the release of these two bars (apricot crumble crunch review coming tomorrow) and Cadbury’s PR team emailed me and then sent me out the two 200g BEASTS that these are. This particular bar uses the standard Dairy Milk chocolate only they threw in sweetened dried cranberries and granola in. One thing I like is the lack of buzzwords on this bar, expecting words such as “JUICY“, “RIPE” and “CRUNCHY“, they just let the bar speak for itself.

The wrapper feels different to normal, it’s plastic but feels almost holographic or something, hard to describe but it’s pretty cool. I guess we may as well open this up and there’s not too much else to comment on.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that it doesn’t look like a 200g bar, but the chunks are so thick that it really is. The bar is filled with big, red cranberries and little pieces of crunchy granola. As expected, the cranberries don’t have much of a taste but provide the soft, chewy texture that fruit always provides in these kind of bars. The granola sometimes has a flavour, whilst nothing like the usual nuts in this bar, crunching down on a piece does sometimes produce a granola-like flavour which is really nice, though it’s rare.

So how is it? Well, it’s ok. I’ve never been the biggest fruit and nut fan as I find it to be a little boring, and to be quite honest that’s what this bar is. Not unpleasant by any means, but just not particularly exciting, I can’t see myself being tempted by this if I were to see it in the shops. I assume these two bars will be limited editions because this one, at least, doesn’t really add a lot to the fruit and nut market.