In my BRUTALLY HONEST opinion

View Original

Goodness knows… maybe

If you’re looking for an indulgent snack, goodness knows, you might want to try these snack squares.

Bitter from the dark chocolate, sour from the cranberry, crunchy from the almonds and sweet from the honey—the only thing missing is a little salt. Even without the salt, these are tasty bites. The only problem we had was looking down and wondering how they were eaten so fast. Four squares just didn’t seem like enough.

Then we started looking a little deeper at this product and there were some red flags that took us from an immediate yes, based on flavor, to a maybe, based on nutritional value and ingredients.

We asked 100 people to try a little goodness by learning a single note.

Would you play an instrument? Violin, sure. Drums, of course. Flute, trombone, trumpet…heck, no!

  • Sugar. 12 grams per serving and 10 grams of added sugar. (That’s 2-1/2 teaspoons of added sugar per serving.)

  • Bioengineered. This product contains bioengineered food ingredients, per the label.

  • Nothing Organic.

  • Full of allergens: nuts, milk, soy, and may contain egg.

There was also a very disturbing marketing video made by this company three years ago. Take a look at this? Who on earth would share a wind instrument? Uh…not us! The concept is good, but we need to think about germs, people!

We visited the Goodness Knows website, which turned out to be the CocoaVia website. It looks like this brand is banking on the cocoa flavanols, as its healthy component of the product, to drive sales.

To be fair, this product is devoid of high-fructose corn syrup, MSG, artificial colors, artificial sweeteners, and trans fat. All good things. So now it becomes a choice for each of us about what’s more important. Flavor or health & wellness. No judging here. None of us are perfect eaters, and we do enjoy eating junk here and there, and that is ultimately where we placed Goodness Knows… in the indulgent snack food category (a.k.a. junk food).