Green Product Review: PURE Bars

Ok, here’s the scoop – I’ve got lots o’ green goodies to review, and due to my flu that lasted forever, I’m behind. That means look for green product reviews pretty much all week here at Tree Hugging Family. That is, unless my power goes out – we’ve had lots of snow, and Portland doesn’t handle snow well.

I’m kicking this review week off with PURE Bars.

Basics: PURE Bars are energy-like bars, invented by a mama in response to her 6-year-old’s desire to become a vegetarian.

Ingredients: PURE Bars are made with organic and raw, fruit and nut-based ingredients. Different flavors have different ingredients of course, but in general, the bars contain no extra anything – no chemicals, no fake colors, no refined sugars, no trans fat, and no wacky things you can’t pronounce. These bars are also Vegan certified. Each bar has about 180-200 calories.

Flavor choices:  PURE Bars are available in the following flavors:

• Chocolate Brownie
• Apple Cinnamon
• Cherry Cashew
• Cranberry Orange
• Choc Chip Trail Mix
• Wild Blueberry

My son Cedar, my sister, and my own little self taste tested three flavors – Chocolate Brownie, Apple Cinnamon, and Cherry Cashew. I used my son to get a kid’s perspective, and my sister because she’s an energy bar addict.

What we think:

The bad news on flavor: None of us loved the Chocolate Brownie flavor. I liked it better than my sis and Cedar. Cedar and my sister both thought the brownie flavor was too sweet. I thought it was a little sweet, but not overly so. However I most likely wouldn’t buy the chocolate flavor. Note that my sister thinks many kids would like the Brownie flavor – Cedar is a kid who still has Halloween candy left, he’s just not too into sweets, so he may not be the best sweet kid judge.

The good news on flavor:  We all liked the Cherry Cashew; although to be honest, I picked the nuts out of mine (I don’t love big nut chunks). The flavor of the cherry bar was sweet, but like a real fruit sweet, not a candy cherry flavor. The Cherry was my sister’s favorite bar. Cedar and me both liked the Apple Cinnamon bars best. If I bought some more, this would be the flavor I’d buy. The Apple Cinnamon was a perfect combo of apple flavor and cinnamon, none of the flavors overpowered the others.

Texture: We all liked the texture. I’m not a huge energy bar fan in general, because most of the time I don’t like how bars feel. However, these bars were nice and soft with a good amount of chewy to them. Also, on a left-over note, we tried these, I wrapped them in foil, and then I left them sitting on the counter for five days. When I opened them back up they had the same nice texture. So you could eat some now, and some later, with no worries.

Overall: These are a good alternative to conventional non-organic energy bars; especially if you’re already an energy bar fan.  I like that they’re certified vegan and organic, and I like that I can say all the ingredients. These energy bars taste homemade and they’re pretty filling; they’d be a good hiking snack or quick breakfast on the go addition. PURE also supports various community effort, which I like to see. It’s great when companies give back. It’s also nice to see a company post ALL their ingredients on their website. The PURE Bars website is very consumer friendly, easy to get around, and not hiding anything.

As for packaging, I’m not sure that the packaging is recyclable. They come in a foil looking wrap, and I couldn’t find a recycle note on the packaging. We still will toss them in the recycle bin, but I’m not 100% sure these can be recycled. I’m thinking yes, as I like to err on the side of go recycling, however, a note on the packaging would be nice.

PURE Bars final score:

Four out of five happy trees. They loose a point because none of us really liked the Chocolate and because of the packaging issues. Overall though, we think that this is a cool company and that this is a good green healthy snack or meal addition for kids and adults. We also think the texture is better than most energy bars we’ve tried and we really liked that you could literally taste the fresh fruit flavor in the fruit minded bars.

Visit PURE Bars to learn more or to buy some bars.

Have you tried PURE Bars? What do you think?

[images via PURE Bars]