Clif ZBar Baked Snack Bars. Peanut Butter, Caramel Apple and Chocolate Brownie. $2.99 to $3.99 per 7.62-ounce box containing six bars.
Bonnie: Thanks, California. I'm loving the new products introduced in response to your Senate Bill 19, designed to guard against childhood obesity by limiting the fat, saturated fat and sugar in foods sold in elementary schools. ZBar is one of those new products. In addition to containing only 2 to 3 grams of fat, no trans fats and no high-fructose corn syrup, ZBars are also all natural and made from 70 percent organic ingredients. Each bar contains 120 to 130 calories, 3 grams fiber, 12 vitamins and minerals and has the texture of a chewy oatmeal cookie; they're tasty and not too sweet.
In other words, Clif ZBars are snack bars you can feel good about giving to your kids.
Carolyn: Do today's sedentary kids really need their own "energy" bar? A bottle of water and a weed-the-garden assignment might work better, but the Clif company is giving them ZBars (slang for "The Bar") anyway.
To up the appeal over traditional energy bars, each is decorated with swirls of icing. They're also not as heavy, and the soy is less prominent than in Clif for grown-ups. But the named flavors still get pretty lost in all the fig and date paste, oat fiber and milled flaxseed.
In short, they're nowhere near as tasty as Quaker Chewy or Kudos, not to mention cookies or McDonald's. As long as we live in a world with these other options, good luck getting kids to eat these instead.
Munchies Kids Mix Snack Mix. $1.99 per 7.25-ounce bag.
Bonnie: Frito-Lay Munchies for kids is a snack mix designed by and for kids. Kid developers mixed Rold Gold Pretzels and Reduced Fat Smartfood cheese popcorn as the main ingredients for this snack. They also added Cheetos, Cap 'n Crunch cereal, Doritos and a few candy-coated chocolate pieces (I found only two in my sample bag). Nutritionally, this resulting mixture is better than many other snacks your kids could eat, such as a candy bar or full-strength Doritos, Cheetos or Fritos.
If these kids had asked me, I would have suggested they use even lower-fat and lower-sugar additions, such as Cheerios and Baked Doritos, and toss in lots of nuts and raisins, Craisins and/or other dried fruits.
Carolyn: In this nutritionally correct day and age, you've got to admire the chutzpah of the Frito-Lay exec who OK'd this kid-endorsed mix of nutritionally naughty cereal, snack chips and candy, and the even greater gall of their placing an "8 essential vitamins and minerals" boast on the bag.
How does it taste? As great as you might expect of any food with an ingredient list the length of Bill Clinton's autobiography — but it doesn't actually taste the way I expected.
Because of the weight and size of the different items and the way they shake down in the bag, there are actually two tastes: pretzels and Doritos accented by a few Cheetos puffs near the top; and a blend of M&Ms and popcorn at the bottom.
Yes, those white things that look like marshmallow cereal pieces on the bag are actually healthful popcorn. If Frito-Lay cares about getting any parents to buy this, they might want to get a photographer in to fix that.
Oscar Mayer Chicken Lunchables. Fun Pack Chicken Dunks and Mega Pack Chicken Strips. $1.79 to $3.19 per 10.5- to 17.2-ounce box containing breaded chicken, drink and snacks.
Bonnie: First time off the assembly line, the folks at Oscar Mayer forgot to include the calories and sugars from the Kool-Aid Jammers on the Nutrition Facts panel of their Fun Pack Chicken Dunks. They've corrected the sugars from the erroneous 15 to the correct 34 grams, now indicating that this "lunch" is half sugar. The Mega Pack Chicken Strips contain even more, with 58 grams, or equivalent to about one-third cup!
The packages boast that the chicken nuggets in these Lunchables are made from 100 percent white meat. That is true, but I found them to be predominantly breading. They really need to replace the sugary items with milk and some fruits and vegetables.
Carolyn: You might call these Chicken-McNuggets-meets-Lunchables. I'd also call the Chicken Dunks overpackaged. The five little nuggets, drink and tiny package of candy are swimming in the cake-mix-size box.
The slightly more generous Mega Chicken Strips appear to be aimed at similarly slightly bigger, older kids (i.e. old enough to prefer a sport drink to Kool-Aid, but not old enough for the strip breading to sport any spiciness).
The good news is that the chicken in both tasted real (i.e. I encountered a bit of gristle but no sponginess).
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). Each week they critique three new food items. © Universal Press Syndicate