I was sent a rather large pile of Eat Natural products to sample.

Eat Natural make a range of snack products, as well muesli. They are gluten free (well check the label, but I think most of them are), as they use crisped rice or cornflakes, instead of oats or flour.

The bars are based on dried fruits, nuts, and then things like crisped rice with chocolate or yoghurt coatings.

Here is a quote from the side of a box; “Down here at the Eat Natural Makery, when we say ‘natural’, what exactly do we mean? Well, clearly it would be wrong for us to claim that everything in this bar is ’100% natural’- chocolate, glucose, crisped rice and infused fruit simple don’t grow on trees. Obviously, everything needs to be cleaned, dried and roasted too, and therefore, to some extent, ‘processed’. It’s just that we believe, the less we mess with it… the better it tastes, and why we will never ever add any dodgy stuff. That means, no artificial flavours or colours and no preservatives. “

So read into that as you wish!

My favourite ones are the plain or chocolate covered ones:

The one with peanuts, cashews, cranberries and milk chocolate is delicious- kind of like a snickers bar (peanuts and chocolate) but the addition of the cranberries adds a lovely chewy sweetness. Nutritionally speaking it is not brilliant, with 190 cals per bar, 3.7g protein, 18.6g sugar and 2.3g saturated fat. But as a treat (or a high carb pre workout snack) it is very tasty.

I also loved the bag with the little bars.

The mini one with cranberries, macadamias and dark chocolate is amazing, and just under 100 cals so good for a little sweet treat. The bag contains 3 varieties (the peanut milk chocolate one, and an apricot yoghurt one too)-which is good for variety. However I was not keen on the yoghurt coated bars, so I would rather they did a bag of chocolate coated ones, and a bag of the yoghurt varieties. But this is a new concept so maybe they will introduce that later on?

I was looking forward to trying the Orange Muesli bar:

The marmalade and seeds in this bar were lovely, but it has a yoghurt coating on the bottom, and I find those coatings very sweet.

I loved the idea of the cherry bakewell bar too, with almonds, dried cherries, dried cranberries and jam, but again the yoghurt coating just made it taste too sweet.

The bar with brazils, sultanas, almonds peanuts and hazelnuts was lovely.

This had no coating, although it was still sweet and chewy (it does contain glucose syrup as well as honey). It also had 6.1g protein (from all the nuts I suppose) and 12.9g sugars, so a little better on that front. Plus it was delicious with lovely chunky pieces of nuts. Yum.

I loved the massive chunks of almond in this bar- there were whole ones in there. I am not always keen on apricot flavoured things, but this was nice, but again sweet with the yoghurt coating.

Love the seeds, love the cranberries, love the massive chunks of almond. Not so keen on the yoghurt coating (sorry for sounding like a broken record!).

The nutritional values really varied from bar to bar. The 45g cherry bakewell bar has 111 cals per bar, whereas the 45g cranberry, dark chocolate and macadamia was 221 cals per bar, and the cashew, blueberry and yoghurt one was 213 cals per 45g bar (so it was not down to the yoghurt coating being less cals than the chocolate). I was surprised by how different they were.

I think if you view these as the occasional treat, then they are lovely. But I do think that with the glucose and honey in them (and the chocolate or yoghurt coatings) then they are not the healthiest snack food out there.

I was surprised to find that some of the boxes has the nutritional content on them, whereas some you had to go to the website to look up. I am not sure if this is something they are gradually adding to the packaging, but I do find it annoying when companies do not list this. Eat Natural, it would be great if you could add this to all your packaging!

I enjoyed sampling them all, and I will look out for the muesli’s as they look delicious too.