The Good: Amazingly nutritious, Very flavorful
The Bad: Proportionately expensive
The Basics: A good snack, Paradise Found fruit snacks are a flavorful, if expensive, way to consume some much needed fruit!
My wife has gotten onto quite the health kick. I am all for improving your health and self-esteem through obtaining the body image you want, but no one has ever made me worry about my health and well-being like my wife does (that includes my first wife!). So, because she seems to genuinely want me around for years to come, I am trying some of the healthy foods she is picking up for herself. The first one that I’ve taken a shine to is Peeled Organic’s Paradise Found fruit blend.
Basics
Peeled Organic is a relatively new fruit snack company that is doing good work for both the environment and personal health. Using no preservatives, Peeled Organic strives to present the healthiest possible dried fruit to customers and, as the name suggests, does so using organic farming methods.
The Paradise Found blend is a combination of dehydrated organic mangoes, pineapple and bananas. This blend is enough to make one entirely rethink what dried fruit ought to be. The dried organic bananas are a far cry from other company’s dried fruit. These bananas are supple, not hard. They are also not covered in a coating of sugar, wax and/or preservatives. Similarly, the pineapple chunks that are a part of the Paradise Found assortment are flexible, not sugared and look like they might have just been cut from a pineapple and left in the sun! The dried mangoes look like dried mangoes, but that is reassuring in and of itself. The Paradise Found fruit blend comes in a 3.5 oz. stiff plastic bag that is resealable.
Ease Of Preparation
Paradise Found fruit packs are simple to use. Simply open the bag and remove the fruit from it! There is no trick to eating Paradise Found; they are a snack that is ready to go from the bag to the mouth.
Taste
The organic mangos in the Paradise Found blend completely absorbed the scent of the bananas. When the fruit was placed on my tongue, this sweet fruit came alive with the subtle, mildly fruity taste of the mango. This tasted more like a traditional dried apple than the flavor of mango, but it was not unenjoyable. It is worth noting that my bag of Paradise Found only had two mango slices in it.
The banana, on the other hand, was exceptionally flavorful. Smelling just like banana, the soft, slightly brown fruit chips came alive on the tongue. In fact, what was so neat about the banana pieces in the Paradise Found blend was how they made me appreciate bananas. These fruit chunks are banana without the excessive water, so the mostly-dehydrated pieces of fruit are sweet and rich in flavor, as opposed to dry and somewhat tasteless. I hadn’t realized just how far from the actual taste of bananas things like Top Banana Jelly Belly jelly beans (reviewed here!) were until I tasted the bold flavor of bananas in the Paradise Found blend!
Finally, the bag was about half-full of pineapple chunks. These inch-long treats are dehydrated pineapple wedges that are about one-fourth as thick as the traditional pineapple chunk. What caught me up was how these chunks smelled very woody, more like bamboo than the delicious pineapple fruit I have loved all my life. But on the tongue, this treat reconstituted to taste exactly like fresh-cut pineapple. The texture may have been drier, but the flavor was exactly as sweet, with the touch of tart flavor at the end, that one expects from pineapple!
Nutrition
Paradise Found organic dried fruits are an all-natural snack, with no preservatives or added sugar. Given that the ingredients are only organic banana, organic mangos and organic pineapples, there is nothing hiding in them that will surprise consumers. These have a shelf life of about six months, so they are not ideal for stocking up on. The package we got on December 26 (2011) expires on June 5, 2012 (or it would have had I not eaten them all up!).
Each 1.4 ounce serving of Paradise Found has 130 calories, none of which come from fat. There are also 2 grams of dietary fiber. Outside that, there are no significant nutrients in a serving, though there is 10% of one’s RDA of Vitamin A, 6% Vitamin C and 2% Iron. They are gluten free and were packaged in a facility that processes nuts, dairy, wheat and soy, so those with applicable allergies ought to keep that in mind.
Storage/Clean-up
Kept in their bag, Paradise Found will remain fresh for a year and as long as the bag is resealed, one suspects they will last that long anyway. Because I only got enough to review, I am not worried about keeping these fresh! They come in, they go right back out!
Cleanup is simple as well. Paradise Found dried fruits are a dry food and thus leave no mess behind. Simply toss out the plastic bag and cleanup is done!
Overall
Paradise Found are a wonderful fruit snack that maintains the nutrition of fruit with a longer shelf life than fresh fruit has. While I found these left me thirsty, there was nothing bad in them and that makes it very easy to recommend . . . despite how expensive the packs of this treat can be!
For other fruit-related reviews, check out my reviews of:
Pomegranate Craisins
Dole 100% Juice Orange Peach Mango Juice
Celestial Seasonings Mandarin Orange tea
5/10
For other food and drink reviews, please click here to visit my index page!
© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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