New Snickers energy bars pack lots of protein, taste

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.