Chocolate covered dried fruit is one of the simplest confections. Raisins, candied orange peels and ginger and cranberries are the most common chocolate coated items. Every once in a while a company comes along to put a little twist on the idea.
Nature Addicts (which goes by [N.A!]) makes Fruit Sticks, which are basically pureed fruit formed into easy to eat pieces. Then they went one step further and coated them in chocolate. They just call them Fruit & Chocolate, which is a descriptive name but not particularly distinctive. The only flavor is Apple Orange.
[N.A!] nuggets made 100% from fruits coated with a fine layer of premium 70% cocoa dark chocolate for a unique experience.
The fruit filling is made from concentrated apple puree, concentrated apple juice, concentrated orange juice, pectin, citrus fiber and natural orange flavor. The chocolate coating is 70% made with reduced fat cocoa powder, in addition to cocoa liquor. It’s sweetened with cane sugar. There’s also a little honey in there, so it’s not marked as a vegan product.
The nuggets are made in The Netherlands, and it’s all non-GMO ingredients. They’re not terribly attractive. There’s no glaze on the panned chocolate coating, so they’re a little lumpy, a little scuffed. They’re mostly flat rectangles, about 1/2 an inch long and 1/3 of an inch wide.
Even though the fruit bits are really more apple than orange, they taste like orange. It’s an immediately zesty flavor, but also very tangy. The texture of the filling is less of a jelly and more like a fruit paste, think a very soft fruit roll up.
It’s a good combination, though the sweet and sour of the chocolate and the filling is a little jarring because both are intense.
Even though it’s a dark chocolate product, they seem pretty kid-friendly. Smaller children probably won’t like the intense bitterness of the chocolate along with the intense sour of the filling, but older kids may find this a nice compromise candy for families that want something with a little cleaner ingredients for snacking. The bag is just over one ounce and only 110 calories, though there are 2.5 grams of fat, there are also 2 grams of fiber and 1 gram of protein. I wouldn’t call them nutritious, but they’re tasty enough as a between meal snack or an addition to a trail mix.
Related Candies
- YumEarth Organics Gummy Fruits
- Jelly Belly Beanaturals: 14 Flavors
- Chuao Orange A Go Go Chocopod
- Torie & Howard Organic Hard Candies
- Niederegger Marzipan Orange
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