Organic Jammy Sammy

Purchased at: Grocery Outlet (Lakewood)
Price: 69 cents for the whole box

Marisa’s Take: Apparently, limey Jamie Oliver isn’t the only one promoting a food revolution with America’s kids. While Revolution Foods (the makers of Jammy Sammies) isn’t doing crazy stuff like pouring sand into school buses and naming children stupid things like “Petal Blossom” and “Buddy Bear”, they are aiming to provide snacks school lunches to kids that are a bit more nutritious than pizza and Little Debbie snack cakes (no offense, Debbie).

While they’re more like a Nutrigrain bar that an actual sandwich, Organic Jammy Sammy snack size sandwich bars are everything a Whole Foods shoppin’ mom would want for their kid: organic, no trans fat, no high fructose corn syrup, whole grain, wheat free and colored with things like “red cabbage extract”. Since we live an hour from the nearest Whole Foods and I feel awkward every time I shop there, we were lucky enough to snag a box of these at Grocery Outlet for 69 cents.

Revolution Foods even has marketed this snack to the pickiest of kids. In addition to all the fancy-schmancy non-artificial ingredients (things like “red cabbage extract” instead of the standard coloring), they were even mindful enough to cut off the crusts, lest any child complain. The problem is so serious, we’ve developed entire product line to combat the issue.

As someone who grew up eating the aforementioned Nutrigrain bars, these little buggers are a fair contender. They’re square, smaller and don’t that that dreaded extra crust so there’s more fruit filling per square inch. While blueberry isn’t my favorite flavor in the world, the moist innards combined well with the oaty outside (I’d take a chance on trying the apple or strawberry ones). Since the bars use agave nectar instead of corn syrup, they’re still quite sweet. However, since they were cheap and they’re manageable enough for children’s hands (as well as mine) they’re a decent snack that’s easy to stash for snack time and won’t make you feel too terribly guilty when you eat it either.

Fits perfectly in my small childlike hands.

Ben’s Take: The old business model for marketing kids food products has generally been to go straight for the child. They haven’t figured out conventional marketing techniques and will believe that eating a hyper sweetened cereal with a colorful cartoon animal/pirate/vampire on the box and millions spent on animators will make breakfast more fun. The Nest Collective is taking a slightly different approach by branding their products as healthy and doesn’t seem to believe in fortifying foods with ESSENTIAL VITAMINS AND MINERALS to make parents think that their products are ok to feed your kids on a daily basis.

Instead they’re attempting to produce a more healthy product by using organic ingredients (though true value of “organic” practices is still being debated in the scientific community). Almost everything in the ingredients list is certified organic, save for the baking soda, natural flavor, red cabbage extract, water and the sea salt which I guess can’t be helped though organic sea salt would be really is really awesome. I mean, how the heck would you track all of the inputs that go into ocean water? Ah, but I digress.

Now I’m really not up for a debate on the utility of avoiding HFCS or eating organic food, and instead get a comparison between the Jammy Sammy and my childhood staple, the Nutrigrain bar. Both bars are extremely similar in every respect, but just different enough that if I were ranking the two products, I would rank the Jammy Sammy as the “better” of the two. The first thing I noticed when eating my Jammy Sammy was that it was much  more dense, and chewy than it’s Nutrigrain counterpart. I also noticed that there was more blueberry “aroma” in every Sammy Jammy bite though the overall bar didn’t taste quite as sweet. This might have been due to the way the filling is spread in the Sammy Jammy since their Calorie and sugar contents are virtually the same (10 calorie difference, 0g sugar difference). Finally the most important part, the Sammy Jammy seemed to be less prone to crushing in the bottom of my messenger bag. Whenever I try transporting a Nutrigrain bar I end up with a Mylar package filled with gooey mix of fruit and cereal blended together. With the Sammy Jammy it hardly took any damage, though my test was hardly scientific. The Jammy Sammy also seems to hold up better to biting and doesn’t want to fall apart every time you take a bite out of it (though the shape lends itself to ~ three bites max.)

Overall, the Jammy Sammy is a better bar. It’s small (perceived) size may lead to the product being less healthy overall because I found that I wanted to eat a second one, because one bar just wasn’t enough to finish a carton of Clover Organic UHT milk. It takes two bars per 16oz carton of milk to satisfy my man sized hunger, but maybe if I were a kid I might be content with just one bar and a school issued 8oz carton of milk. Just maybe.

Tags: Blueberry, Kids, Organic

This entry was posted on Monday, April 18th, 2011 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Food. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.