Review: Hershey's Whole Bean Chocolate

Chocolate may not yet have a reputation as being a health food. While consuming large quantities of it can make you fat, the food also contains large quantities of antioxidants. While for full health benefits dark chocolate should be consumed, many people do not like the taste. (I am not one of them, but when it comes down to it, I personally would prefer milk chocolate over the dark variety.) Hershey's Foods, a long time purvey of chocolate and perhaps the best known United States company for manufacturing the product.

When I first saw a bag of Hershey's whole bean chocolate I must admit I was skeptical. To me it looked like a bag of coffee and I personally cannot stand the taste of that beverage. When it turned out to be chocolate instead I must admit I still had my doubts about how the product would taste once it was placed upon my taste buds. Since I am a fan of chocolate in virtually all of its forms, I decided to taste it out.

To be honest, it did taste a little like dark chocolate and the bag touted how much fiber the product contained and its other health benefits which should be warning to the consumer that the marketers were not focused on taste while the product was being researched, but however, it simply tasted like a slightly milder form of dark chocolate and while I may pass it up in favor of the standard Hershey bar or my personal favorite from the company Skor bars or Symphony bars with toffee bits, I would not turn it down if one were offered to me.

As one might have expected for a product being labeled as healthful, it is a little more expensive than the standard Hershey product but not much more so. A decent size bag ran about three dollars at my local drug store. And well, if you find the taste to be more pleasing to you than I do, it is perfectly all right for the occasional overindulgence in this chocolate. Each small square bar contains five grams of fiber, and nothing with fiber in it can be bad for you, can it? If nothing else, it will keep your internal plumbing system clean and lower your rates of certain types of cancer. (I think.) If not, the food of the Aztec gods has long been known to produce a chemical in the brain similar to what is naturally produced when a person is in love.