JJ's Berry Pie - Product Review

As I'd had a long week, my husband decided to pick me up a sweet treat at Fareway. If you aren't familiar with the grocery store chain it's likely because they have stores only in Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois and Minnesota. But they are a very friendly store with good prices. One of these well priced items was JJ's Berry Pie. All of JJ's fruit pies are only 50 cents, which made this a very affordable treat for me.

JJ's Berry Pie (and all their fruit pies) are similar in size and shape to Hostess fruit pies, with their familiar fruit filled folded circle of pastry. This whole type of food is really closer in design to an empanada than a traditional pie, but who am I to quibble?

JJ's Berry pie comes in a box with a dusty blue border. The front of the box is nearly filled with a picture of the product, cut at one end to spill out the berry filling. In the background of the upper left corner are a layer of what appear to be blackberries. The box front also tells us that JJ's Berry Pie has "Real Fruit Filling!" and is microwavable. In the upper right hand corner is JJ's mascot: an alligator (or maybe a crocodile?) wearing sunglasses and a Hawaiian shirt. He is surrounded with a circular "splash" of blue. I'm guessing the ambiguous crocodilian is meant to give the product a relaxed and summery image.

JJ's berry pie tasted really good. The crust has a nice bite, not too dry and not too crumbly. The berry filling was sweet and the blackberries carried through nicely. There is always a bit of gelatinousness in this kind of treat, but I found this pie's filling to be fairly smooth with a nice density. Some pies I've had of this type have filling that is unpleasantly chewy. JJ's berry pie was much better. This pie was SUPER sweet, but I don't have an issue with that personally.

Now for the inevitable bad news. And in this case it's pretty bad. Each JJ's berry pie has 400 calories! That's nearly a meal's worth for me. (I cut it in half and ate it over 2 days, which helps a bit.) Along with those calories you get 26 percent of your daily value of fat. Even worse you get 48 percent of your saturated fat. Yikes! And the news for sodium isn't great either, with each pie containing 520 milligrams, or 22 percent of your daily-recommended value. The only returns you get are 6 percent of your daily-recommended value of dietary fiber, 8 percent of your daily-recommended value of iron, and 3 grams of protein. Not a great trade off.

Now you probably wouldn't pick up one of JJ's Fruit Pies thinking you are getting good nutrition, but this is one of those treats you really want to read the packaging on so you can make an informed decision. I will likely indulge in a JJ's fruit pie from time to time. I recommend it as a once-in-a-long-while treat.

Enjoy!