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Messy Monkeys Snack Bars | Chewsday Review

So many requests lately for a review of the Messy Monkeys Fruit bars. Your wish is my command! Today’s Chewsday Review features the Messy Monkeys Strawberry and Apple Snack Bar. How do these compare to other snack or fruit bars? Let’s see…

Ingredients

Positives

Excellent fibre content, with 4.6g per bar, which is good for little tummies. This is also really helpful for kiddos who don’t eat a lot of fibre in vegetables or have issues with constipation. This amount of fibre works out to 33% of a young child’s fibre recommendation, and 26% of an older child’s daily fibre recommendations. Interestingly, this is almost 8 times more fibre than the Rafferty’s garden fruit snack bars from last week’s review.
Very low sodium (salt) content.
The overall fat content is within healthy guidelines at 8.9g/100g (from the seeds and canola oil which are both good fats). The saturated fat content comes in under healthy guidelines at 1.3g/100g.
No nuts so they’re lunchbox safe.
These bars are 69c/bar (full price) and cost less than most muesli bars (they are only 20g though).

Negatives

The sugar content comes in at 33.6g per 100g, which is technically double the recommended limit, but all of this is naturally occurring sugar from the fruit with ZERO added sugar. Interestingly, Rafferty’s Garden fruit snack bars have more sugar and almost 30% of that comes from added sugar. So the Messy Monkeys is definitely a better option.
On a side note, I’d just like to clarify a couple of things about dried fruit. I often hear people say ‘oh, dried fruit is full of sugar’. Essentially, dried fruit is just normal fruit that has had all of the water removed. No extra sugar is added. But, because the fruit is much smaller than fresh fruit (think of a sultana compared to a grape), you tend to eat more dried fruit (and therefore eat more sugar). This is not a bad sugar, and it does contain fibre, but it’s just easy to overdo it. It also gets stuck in kids’ teeth much more easily than fresh fruit. Essentially, it’s a nutritious food but not something you want to offer at every meal or snack.

Marketing

Alternatives

This product is a reasonable choice in a snack aisle often filled with foods containing very high levels of sugar, fat and salt. Compared to other snack bars it does really well; I’d just be careful about offering dried fruit too often (especially for little teeth).
The Messy Monkeys banana bread and apple pie bars don’t have as much fibre (there’s more puffed rice and milk powder) but they’re still high in fibre and I’d consider them a nutritious option.