Candy Bar Lab

Sky Bars are manufactured by NECCO, New England Confectionary Company, which I associate with NECCO wafers — the worst candy ever made (one of the flavors is clove! yuck…). I learned never to eat them again after I first tasted one around 1987. So I’m hoping that NECCO’s Sky Bar turns out to be a lot better than those terrible chalky wafers.

Structure
A molded, milk chocolate bar with four segments - each with a different filling (caramel, vanilla cream, peanut butter, and chocolate fudge).

Texture
All of the fillings are soft and pretty similar in consistency.  The caramel and vanilla fillings are noticeably granular - not pleasant. There’s really no excuse for having sugar crystals in a finished product, especially in a product like caramel, which should be silky. The peanut butter filling was surprisingly the smoothest of the bunch, which is kind of weird because peanut butter doesn’t need to be smooth - it can be a little more coarse and crunchy and still be good.

Taste
When I first tried the peanut butter filling, I thought it was the caramel filling.  It doesn’t taste like peanut butter. With my second bite, I could make out a little bit of the peanut flavor. If you’re expecting it to be anything like a Reese’s peanut butter cup, you’d be way off.

The vanilla filling is forgettable. I really wish it had been marshmallow filling. Instead, it’s too sweet - like the inside of a Cadbury creme egg.

The caramel center is slightly salty, but has no deep, caramel flavor like I would prefer.

The chocolate fudge filling is my favorite. It tastes like brownie batter, which to me, is a good thing. I love licking the spoon after making brownies. Like the other fillings, it’s more sugary and sweet than anything. It could have been a more intense chocolate flavor, but it was good enough.

Verdict
The concept of four different fillings in one candy bar is cool.  If executed well it would be really good but this bar is not well done.  The chocolate is sub par and none of the fillings are very good (though I did kind of like the chocolate fudge). It’s a classic example of a product that does a little bit of everything, but doesn’t do anything particularly well. If NECCO were to combine the classic name and branding of the Sky Bar with high quality product and good execution, this could become a thumbs up.

Tags: caramel, fudge, milk chocolate, peanut butter, vanilla cream

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Candy, NECCO, Negative, Review, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.