Make Friends With Fruit: Crispy Green is a different kind of snack food and we think you’ll like it
When it comes to eating, the things that taste good are not always the things that are good for us. When you’re hungry, grabbing a sugary snack or a crunchy bag of chips is easy, and immediately satisfying. I’m willing to bet that every time you eat one of those “tastes good but makes you feel so bad” snacks, you know that there are better choices, it’s just a matter of finding them.
Crispy Green sent a box of 100% natural fruit snacks which are not just healthy, they’re low in calories, they taste good, and most of all, they satisfy your cravings without risking your waistline. You can eat an entire bag of these and actually feel good about your choice.
Fruit is an energizing and healthy snack, but lugging around fresh fruit can be a problem. Soft fruit like bananas and pears can squish and make a mess. Apples are heavy and can bruise. Other fruits like cantaloupe, mango or pineapple have to be peeled and sliced and carried around in a container to eat with a spoon or fork (no one is going to pull a big pineapple out of their tote for lunch or a snack)! Crispy Green offers fruit snacks in packages including Pineapple, Asian Pear, Apple, Cantaloupe, Mango and Tangerine,
Dried fruit makes snacking easy, but not all dried fruit is equal. There are several ways to dry it, and each has its own taste and texture, even though it’s the same fruit. The Crispy Green Snacks are freeze dried. This means that through a process of freezing and vacuum they have removed all of the water from a ripe fruit in a matter of minutes. This leaves the taste and vitamins and natural sugars intact, but alters the texture into a crunchy, but not hard, fruit “chip.” The process works better on some fruits than others, mostly, because we are used to overly sweetened fruit. So for example, the banana chips taste very much like banana and the pineapple was slightly tart but certainly tasted like pineapple. The Tangerine was one of our favorites because it was light and airy and tart–and totally tangerine in flavor. The pears were subtle. Mange and cantaloupe however, were not what we expected. It’s not that they tasted bad, but in the freeze drying process they seemed to have lost a lot of the ripe and juicy essence that makes a ripe mango or a succulent slice of cantaloupe so enjoyable. Tastes vary, and you’ll find the ones that you like the best.
That said, what it so nice about these slim, super-lightweight and therefore tote-able packettes of fruit snacks is that an an entire bag, about the size of a snacksize/lunchbox bag of chips, has a calorie range (depending upon the fruit you choose) of just 35-60 calories. The contents are not just satisfying to eat, they’re enough to fill up most people for a snack. None of the fruit snacks have more than 8g of sugar, and some have less. Few have any sodium at all. Most are gluten free, dairy free, vegan kosher, peanut tree and nut free. They are free of additives and preservatives, they’re fat-free, cholesterol free, non-GMO Project Verified, and Kosher Certified. Is there anything bad we could say about Crispy Green?
Uh…maybe… The cost, depending upon where you purchase these. A single packette is $1.59 per bag on the Crispy Green Web Site (discounts for larger orders) which is about 60 cents more than the average bag of chips or other cheap snacks. On Amazon, we saw a Crispy Green Fruit Variety Pack, 0.36 Ounce (16 Count) for $16.20 However, considering the health benefits, it could be worth juggling something around in your budget to accommodate these. Moms who find that getting kids to eat enough fruit is a struggle, may find that their kids think eating Crispy Green snacks are fun and that’s half the battle. Crispy Green snacks are great for your tote, and for travel, since they’re completely sealed, slim and non-messy.
We have tried plenty of snack foods, but rarely do we find one that’s healthy, fun and a “fruit-ful” part of a healthy eating lifestyle. That’s why we’re giving Crispy Green in it’s own feature.