Since a few frustrating health diagnoses including diabetes, I have become a huge ChocZero fan and these delicious fruit chews have been my most frequently purchased item!
Between the Choc Zero site and Amazon, I’ve ordered an embarrassingly high amount over the past several months. I love the flavors, especially the watermelon surprisingly. These little candies helped me tremendously in cutting out sugar from my diet because they are fun to chew and satisfy my sweet tooth.
My favorite thing about ChocZero is that they use Monkfruit sweetener, which is both natural and delicious—much tastier and easier on my stomach than other sugar free sweeteners. I’m unfortunately very allergic to stevia, which seems to be the most popular natural sugar free sweeteners, making it so I can’t have most of the sugar free treats on the market. It can be really disappointing and frustrating. But I can trust all of Choc Zero’s products!
So why the 4 star? These chews have been amazing, but I need to explain some issues that I’ve had lately.
1. TEXTURE. The most recent packs have actually been much softer (sometimes the candies are very hard and difficult to chew unless you warm them up). However, the more recent packs have had very unpleasant hard chunks in them. This has happened with all the flavors but more frequent in the strawberry. I’ll be chewing along, and then bite into a painfully hard chunk. At first I thought these chunks were plastic, but upon further inspection they might be undesolved/unmixed colorless chunks of whatever the fibrous base of the candy is. I’ve also found a couple hard black spots about the size of a grain of pepper, but the larger chunks are more concerning. I got into the habit of manually stretching each chew out to inspect them for these chunks before consuming them, so I can pick them out and throw them away before chomping into them and hurting my teeth. This might be a testament to how much I love these candies, that I’ve been willing to spend so much time and energy inspecting each one so I can eat them safely.
2. TASTE. I could be wrong, but it seems like the newer candies have a slightly different color and taste. I feel like the old ones were more fruity and flavorful, with the newer packs tasting more “dull”. If having both a softer texture and stronger flavor was possible, these candies would be incredible!
3. PACKAGING. This is no where near as important a problem as the texture thing, but I think it’s worth mentioning. I think it’s good that the candies are individually wrapped, but it seems unnecessary that they would be individually wrapped in thick wrappers, then wrapped up again in little packs of 8 or so, then about 8 of those wrapped up again in a box. I’d recommend either cutting out the middle step of bundling them in packs of 8 and just put the individually wrapped candies in a box or bag, OR, make the packaging of the bundles easier to open. The amount of wrappings and garbage I end up with after consuming just one box of these chews is excessive.
In summary, I’m very thankful for Choc Zero and hope they keep making these delicious chews, but would really appreciate if they addressed some of the issues to make them the perfect sugar free fruit chews!
