Paleo | Gluten Free | Vegan
Net carbs: 19 g Added sugars: 0 g (9g of sugar from the dates and mangoes)
Overall rating: 😊🌱🥭💚
Flavor
This is one of the better flavors I’ve reviewed for the Snack-vestigations. Dates are a perfect foundation for wonderful rich flavors.
Mango and date is kind of tricky though. I experimented with a mango lime flavored Dirtball when I first started making them, and couldn’t find a good balance.
Can we just pause for a second a show mangoes some love? This is one of the best fruits, up there with dates, coconut, and papaya.
They even depict how to properly cut a mango in the artistic rendering on their wrapper. If you don’t slice a mango right, you wind up wasting a lot and getting juice everywhere.
In addition to making a pretty good snack, Evo is also doing a great community service showing us proper mango slicing technique.
One suggestion: Evo should consider adding some cardamom to this for a little more pop to the flavor. A bit of spice helps balance out such sweet flavors.
Packaging appeal
People always want to know what they’re eating. So many food brands choose to put artistic renderings of a key ingredient front-and-center on the packaging.
This works well for Evo Hemp’s fruit and nut bar. They need it to look like a mango, but a photo would be boring, so they do a fun little drawing of a mango sliced to perfection.
Actually, now that I think of it I didn’t even notice this was a mango when I picked it up. I just knew it felt natural and leafy, which appeals to our primal desire to be connected to the earth.
My big gripe with this product, though, is the unnecessary amount of wrapper here. The actual bar is 2/3 the size of the wrapper.
The cynical interpretation of this is that they intentionally oversized the wrapper to make you think that you’re buying more food than you really are.
The generous interpretation is that these bars are manufactured in a facility that is set up to make rappers this size and adjusting it to cut smaller wrappers would be prohibitively expensive.
It makes me sad, though, to think of all that excess plastic floating around. And nobody takes care of their trash. American culture is all about throwing shit away unnecessarily.
People should be making bottle bricks, though, and taking responsibility for the waste they produce. Every wrapper from these reviews goes into one of my bottle bricks. My homies are collecting these out on their farm and someday soon we’ll use them to build a cobb pizza oven or something.
If you’re going to produce waste, then take some responsibility over where it goes.
Ingredient quality
There is nothing in this fruit and seed bar that doesn’t belong there. Some motherfuckers out here make fruit and seed bars, but add a bunch of sweeteners and stabilizers, thus rendering the potentially healthy ingredients impotent and hopeless.
There’s nothing worse than seeing some beautiful blueberries drowning in a sea of unnecessary added sweeteners.
I do get offended when people use terms like “the most nutritionally complete food source on earth” in reference to their ingredients, though.
Statements like this are pure marketing fluff for a lot of reasons:
- There is immense variability between individuals in terms of gut biome, metabolism, and our ability to process nutrients
- Does this mean that hemp has more of every nutrient that people need than any other food?
- No. “Nutritionally complete”means you won’t die if this is the only thing you eat. It does not necessarily mean it will improve your health (and that’s what they want you to think it means)
- If you only ate hemp you’d be miserable
A lot of marketing relies on the general public’s ignorance of specific technical terms. People use vague healthish terms like this to trick people into buying their products.
Company practices
Dubious nutritional claims aside, Evo is a great company. They have a lot of CBD and hemp products, packaged and marketed in appealing ways.
For any commodity to thrive it needs both reliable producers and people who can repackage and market that commodity to the right people.
Hemp is one of the most powerful and remarkable plants in the world. We need as many companies as possible to create hemp products and spread the love.
Evo actually has a Hemp Academy on their site, which looks amazing! In addition to helping market hemp products, they’re helping other people learn how to thrive in this wonderful industry.
Evo and I must be smoking the same stuff, because it seems like we both believe education is a great form of marketing. They’re not in this purely for themselves. Putting out this info demonstrates a genuine concern for spreading the joys of hemp throughout the world.
They’re putting in work for the whole world.
Furthermore, any company that sells CBD is good in my book. This exceptional healing compound has countless benefits. It’s helped me with sleep, anxiety, and muscle pain.
If you haven’t already, please do some research into CBD’s potential to improve your life. It’s always amazing how many different ways this plant helps us thrive.
Snackability
Small size + good flavor + natural energy = totally snackable 👍
Final Verdict
Overall, Evo Hemp Bars get a rating of 😊🌱🥭💚
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