Organic 100 Calorie Cookies

Organic, 100 calories, what's not to like? Archer Farms (a Target stores private label brand) makes a large number of organic food products. The one that caught my notice was the 100 calorie cookies. The espresso variety to be exact.

I have not seen many 100 calorie organic snack food products, so I decided to give them a try. The cost was comparable to what you would pay for non-organic name brand 100 calorie snacks. That is to say you pay a slight premium for the fact that they are already measured out in portion controlled sizes.

Nutritional Considerations:

Making sure it's really organic. Before biting in, I decided to take a close look at the ingredients. A surprising number of the organic food products on the market today are not entirely organic. I've seen more than one company offering "partially organic" or "75%" organic foods. Looks like we are alright this time. Every item in the list is explicitly labeled as organic with the exception of the last ingredient: natural mocha flavor. This might be a minor concern, but given that everything else is organic, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Fats and Sugars

These are neither fat nor sugar free. The calorie savings comes solely from portion size. Of the four grams of fat however, only one gram is saturated and they contain no trans fats. Checking for trans fats is always a bit tricky since manufactures can legally call anything less than half a gram zero. The ingredients however, don't list the give-away (hydrogenated oil of any kind).

As you would expect, they do not contain refined sugars. No high fructose corn syrup or other nasty business. The primary sweetener is evaporated cane juice. Each pack is a total of fifteen grams of carbs, with six of those coming from sugar.

Portion size and Taste

Due diligence, complete it's time to open up the box. Inside you will find five 100 calorie bags. One for each work day lunch, I can live with that. In each bag you get about eight small cookies (roughly the size of quarter). Biting in, they have a satisfying crunch. I had expected the taste to be a little bitter, but was pleasantry surprised at how sweet they are. If you ate one blindfolded though, you would probably be hard pressed to identify at as an espresso flavor. The flavor tends more to the chocolaty side than coffee (not a bad thing, but you need to know what you are getting). Eaten slowly, they are enough to satisfy a mild to moderate sugar craving.

Conclusion

The only bad news is the limited availability. They are Target stores exclusive and at the time of this writing were not available for purchase on line. Archer Farms has a number of other organic food products though, including regular sized boxes of cookies. So if you happen to be in a Target hunting toothpaste, you might be able to check some organic food items of your grocery list as well.