When a product touts itself as “real food”, it’s disappointing when it doesn’t deliver on taste.

That’s what we found with Super Pop’s nut butter bars: natural, non-GMO ingredients but flavor profiles that are heavy-handed and unbalanced. IMBHO-no!

Starting with the Churro bar, it’s the cinnamon eating challenge all over again… and it wasn’t good the first time. Cinnamon’s sweet & spicy scent is certainly misleading. By itself cinnamon is pungent and can overwhelm the senses, but when mixed appropriately with other ingredients, it enlivens the tasting experience. Unfortunately, eating Super Pops Churro bar is like eating a spoonful of cinnamon.

The Almond Blueberry bar wasn’t much better. The ingredient list indicates this bar includes real blueberries: “dried blueberries (apple juice sweetened)”; however, our taste testers kept bringing up the terms “artificial” and “off-putting” when discussing this bar.

We were all hopeful when it came to the Peanut Butter and Chocolate bar. That’s always the perfect combination. How could it go wrong? To our surprise it did. There was an overpowering flavor in this bar that covered the peanut butter and chocolate, and it was a flavor we tasted in every bar — too much sweetener!

Looking further we noted each bar had the same second and third ingredients: organic honey and organic tapioca syrup. Super Pops nut butter bars prove that there can be too much of a good thing, and these two ingredients take “real food” to the bottom of the the barrel when it comes to taste.

There was one highlight with these bars and that was the texture. Everyone loved the texture and bit of crunch from the brown rice and quinoa crisps. Beyond that Super Pops needs to rethink the recipe or this nut butter bar will never survive in the healthy snack bar space. Competition is fierce and inferior products fail and fail fast.

On the flip side, we love the story behind the company. We love that it was founded by a mompreneur who wanted better snacks for her family. We hope Super Pops will continue to fine tune the recipe and highlight the flavors that should be prominent rather than covering them up with unnecessary sugars.

For more information on Super Pops, the story, and its founder, visit the website.