Unreal is a relatively new brand of candy and chocolates with an interesting story. The founder of the company is a teenager, Nicky Bonner, whose parents limited his candy intake because of all the bad ingredients in them. He decided to create candies his parents would actually allow him to eat. It also helps that his partner in the business is his dad, a former advertising executive and well connected multi-millionaire who founded and sold the Digitas advertising agency to Publicis.
So how do these candies differ from traditional fare such as M&Ms, Reese’s peanut butter cups, and other mainstays of American candy culture? According to the company, it does not use artificial colors, partially hydrogenated oils, high fructose corn syrup, and GMOs.
That’s very cool!
Here, for example, is the Unreal Chocolate Caramel Nougat Bar:
milk chocolate (cane sugar, chocolate, cocoa butter, milk powder, organic blue agave inulin, skim milk, soy lecithin, vanilla extract), caramel (tapioca syrup, cane sugar, fructan (prebiotic fiber), organic palm kernel oil, whey, milk protein concentrate, organic cream, vanilla extract, salt, soy lecithin), tapioca syrup, cane sugar, milk protein concentrate, organic palm kernel oil, skim milk powder, cocoa powder, salt, hydrolyzed milk protein, evaporated cane syrup, soy lecithin, vanilla extract.
The bar is 170 calories, has 5 tsp of sugar, and 4 grams of saturated fat (20% of the daily max). Similar nutrition to other bars. Not even close to the nutrition value one can get from truly healthy snacks, like fruit. You may ask, why is Fooducate mentioning fruits in a post about chocolate snacks? Well, Unreal’s website actually makes such a comparison, in a very lame way. That’s not a smart move.
But other than that, Unreal is very interesting. The fact that many of the bad ingredients traditionally found in candies are not here, is very encouraging. For parents debating which of two candies to buy – Unreal is the better choice. However, the products sold are still candy. So don’t eat up on these as if they are health foods. If Unreal starts to pick up steam, expect the Hershey and Mars to introduce similar “healthy” lines of products, or to bid to buy Unreal.
