Peanut butter is one of life’s great pleasures. It’s also packed with calories. Hence, people looking for a peanut-buttery snack without the caloric baggage are stuck with roughly zero options. Add in an element of chocolate craving, and you’re stuck, brother – up chocolate creek without a peanut butter paddle.
Reese’s, the purveyors of fine peanut butter cups, must have seen this as a market that needed filling, a problem to be tackled by an army of food scientists. And how did Reese’s solve this problem? By making a peanut butter snack with hardly any peanut butter in it. Why didn’t I think of that?
See, this is a “wafer bar” at heart, and make no mistake – the only purpose of the wafer is to fill up space, replacing calorie-dense peanut butter with crispy air. The result? It satisfies about as much as a mouth full of air, while weighing in at a respectable 100 calories. That’s a pretty huge trade-off.
It tastes like it’s 100 calories, all wafer without much else. You can taste the peanut butter and chocolate, but the cloying flavour of the wafer is front and centre.
As you’d expect, it doesn’t fill you up at all. By the time you’re done the bar, you’re no less hungry, and no more satisfied, than you were before.
The only real selling point is that it’s a sort of stop-gap for your peanut butter craving, something to give your mouth a taste of Reese’s when you just can’t justify triple the calories on a trio of peanut butter cups. But it’s a poor substitute, and you’ll be left dreaming of the real thing as soon as the wrapper hits the garbage can.
RATINGS AND DETAILS
Cost: $0.79 at a convenience store.
Value for cash money: Cheaper than a standard chocolate bar, but less filling, too.
Availability: Looks to be a recent arrival in town, so spotty availability for the moment. Also saw it in granola-bar-style boxes at a supermarket.
Nutrition?: It’s a harm-reduction program in a chocolate bar form. The only real nutritional benefit is that it contains ONLY 100 calories. And what’s this? Trans-fat to the tune of 0.1 grams?
Suitability for school lunches?: Not if your kid’s school has a zero-peanut policy.
The verdict: Meh. It’s inherently a junk-food compromise. If you’re really craving a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, you’ll get very little satisfaction from a Reese’s Peanut Butter Wafer Bar. If you’re looking for a 100-calorie snack that isn’t a piece of fruit, then OK, feel free. But it wouldn’t be my first choice.
