Snickers Marathon, Chewy Chocolate Peanut and Multi-Grain Crunch, $1.49 per 1.94-ounce bar.
Bonnie: Snickers Marathon is the first energy bar to derive from a candy bar. So perhaps it's not surprising that it tastes much better than other energy bars I recall testing. Like other bars, it's vitamin-fortified. Snickers Marathon also contains 60 fewer calories, about half the fat and sugar and more than twice the protein of a Snickers candy bar. So it's a much better choice to satisfy a hunger pang than candy. Nutritionally, it's comparable to its energy bar competitors. They're all expensive, fortified candy bars — the Snickers name just makes this more obvious.
Carolyn: The already fine line between energy bar and candy bar became even thinner recently with the introduction of Snickers Marathon. It's an energy bar that trades off the name of America's best-selling candy bar. The question is: Is this a Snickers in name only or also in taste?
Snickers Marathon resembles a regular Snickers only in the general sense that both products feature nuts, caramel and chocolate and taste good. The Chewy Chocolate Peanut comes closest to the original Snickers ingredients, so I expected to like it better than the Multi-Grain Crunch. But just the opposite was the case. For whatever reason, the soy base is more pronounced in the Chocolate Peanut. The Multi-Grain is like a denser Quaker Chewy Granola Bar.
Any number of Clif and Luna Bars taste just as good. But with Snickers Masterfoods USA's distribution system on its side, Marathon will probably be much easier to find.
Orville Redenbacher's Gourmet Popping Corn, Cinnabon, Old Fashioned Butter and Tender White, $2.29 to $2.69 per 9.8- to 10.5-ounce box containing two or three microwavable bags.
Bonnie: Sweet and salty kettle corn is bad enough. But news of Orville Redenbacher's new Cinnabon microwave popcorn made me think someone at the company had gone daffy. Who would want popcorn as sweet as a Cinnabon, the gooey, intensely caloric cinnamon buns sold mainly in malls? Not me, which is why I approached the task of tasting this with trepidation.
Before I squeezed on and tossed the popcorn with its sticky white frosting, it tasted cinnamon-flavored. After the frosting, it became a sweet, sticky mess with all the fat of a mall Minibon, although with only half the calories and with 2 grams more fiber. But this is good only in the unlikely event that someone would eat a serving of this instead of a cinnamon roll.
Cinnabon also costs 50 percent more than Orville's other new flavors, including Old Fashioned Butter and Tender White, both of which contain real butter and which I liked more than this.
Carolyn: Frosting on popcorn? Yes, frosting and cinnamon are the main draws behind the newest and weirdest Orville Redenbacher flavor: Cinnabon. Even this avowed junk foodie found this idea hard to wrap my mind around. But once I had a popped bag of it in front of me, I found it hard to stop eating.
Nevertheless, I doubt I'll be a regular customer. I just can't think of a food occasion that demands Cinnabon popcorn. A real cinnamon bun goes better with coffee and makes a more substantial breakfast, and cookies are a more portable and less messy sweet snack. This is the first and only popcorn that goes better with milk than with soda, though (which should please Bonnie).
The other two new Orville Redenbacher flavors are as traditional as the Cinnabon is not. I suspect butter's high price has something to do with the dearth of the touted real butter in Orville's Old Fashioned Butter Popcorn variety. The Tender White has more, so it tastes better (great, actually). It seems both natural and a treat.
Amy's Organic Soups, Alphabet, Butternut Squash, Lentil Vegetable, Chunky Tomato Bisque and Pasta and 3 Bean Soups, $1.99 per 14.1- to 14.4-ounce can.
Bonnie: These five new heat-and-serve soups are the latest addition to Amy's Kitchen's line of vegetarian, organic and generally good-tasting products. My favorite is the fiber-rich, hearty Lentil Vegetable soup. Eat the entire can, as I did, and you'll have consumed 18 of the 25 grams of fiber you're supposed to eat in a day in a most enjoyable way. The Pasta and 3 Bean has a respectable 8 grams of fiber per can, but it needs livening with a few drops of Tabasco. The others are also good, although, like all soups, a bit high in sodium.
Carolyn: I wouldn't recommend buying Amy's new organic soups because they're full of fiber and are organic and vegetarian. Buy them because they have a fresher, less glutinous texture than Campbell's and Progresso. This is particularly true of her new Lentil Vegetable and Pasta and 3 Bean varieties, as these are also the heartiest of the new offerings. But Bonnie's right about the Pasta and 3 Bean's lack of spices. Amy's frozen pizzas and sandwiches are proof that this company knows how to season vegetarian fare. So why are her soups so often dull?
Pureed soups are not substantial enough to be worth eating. That's why I can't recommend Amy's Butternut Squash, Chunky Tomato Bisque and tomato bisque-based Alphabet, fresher-seeming as they may be.
Bonnie Tandy Leblang is a registered dietitian and professional speaker. Carolyn Wyman is a junk-food fanatic and author of "Jell-O: A Biography" (Harvest/Harcourt). © Universal Press Syndicate