The Good: Inexpensive, Does not taste bad
The Bad: Obviously not very healthy, Unremarkable taste, Dry aftertaste, VERY messy/melty
The Basics: The 5th Avenue is a shockingly incongruent chocolate bar that seeks to compete against the much more consistent Butterfingers.
When I originally began to consider the 5th Avenue chocolate bars I picked up at my local grocery store, I wondered how it was that I had never had one of these chocolate bars before. As I finish these bars, which are essentially sweeter on the outside, but less sweet on the inside than their closest competitor, the Butterfinger candy bar, I think that perhaps someone was doing me a favor by keeping these from me all of these years. In addition to having an intensely dry and unpleasant aftertaste, these are horrible on the nutrition level. After eating two of these bars for freview, I am at 50% of my saturated fat intake for the day.
The 5th Avenue may be Hershey’s answer to the Butterfinger bar, but it is not a particularly good answer or a candy I am likely to ever try again (assuming I come out of the diabetic coma I am slipping into as I write this).
Basics
5th Avenue is a pretty standard chocolate candy bar, designed to appeal to all consumers. The 2 ounce candy bar is wrapped in a brown plastic wrapper with yellow, red and white lettering. This is one of the most plain packages I have ever seen for a candy bar. Inside, the mostly smooth candy bar looks like what one might expect, a milk chocolate rectilinear food that is remarkably nondescript. The 5th Avenue bar is about 5" long and 1” wide and 1/2” tall with no external texturing (this candy bar does not have nuts or other filling than the caramel).
Ease Of Preparation
These are candy bars made by Hershey’s and as a result, preparing them is as easy as opening the wrapper and removing the bar. From there, one need only put the bar in your mouth and chew! It does not need to be any more complicated than that! 5th Avenue chocolate bars come ready-to-eat and require no preparation save removal from the wrapper. However, more than any candy bar I have tried in recent memory, the 5th Avenue bars have a soft, easily melted chocolate exterior that makes it very messy to eat.
Taste
Opening the 5th Avenue wrapper, the scent that instantly overwhelms the senses is that of sweet chocolate. There is not a hint of peanut butter in the aroma when the wrapper is unwrapped.
The sweetness of the chocolate around the 5th Avenue bar quickly melts away to reveal the very dry peanut butter flavor of the hard, flaky peanut butter center beneath. The peanut butter is appropriately nutty in its flavor, but it is not very sweet at all. The result is a candy bar that smacks the consumer with overwhelming sweetness, then sucker punches them with a dry, nutty taste that is not as sweet or even as flavorful as the Butterfinger bar that this is clearly attempting to compete with.
The 5th Avenue bar leaves a strong, dry aftertaste in the mouth.
Nutrition
Obviously, these are candies and the folks at Hershey’s do not intend for consumers to live on them. They are a snack and not a terribly nutritious one at that. A serving is considered the full 2 oz. candy bar. With the standard recommended serving size, the candy has 260 calories, 100 of which are from fat! That's 18% of the RDA of fat, with 25% of the RDA coming from the five grams of saturated fat! While there is 6% of the RDA of calcium and four grams of protein, there is no denying that this candy is not good for you and one ought to use it as a dessert occasionally, not a meal ever. I was surprised this candy bar contained no cholesterol, but a whopping 120 mg of Sodium.
The lack of health benefits ought to be obvious from the ingredients list, which is led by sugar, peanuts and corn syrup. Near the end of the list, the ingredients become more chemical in nature than appealing. In addition to including peanuts, the 5th Avenue bars were processed on machinery that handled coconuts! The presence of milk makes the 5th Avenue bar not Vegan-compliant, but there is no notation on the Kosher status of this candy.
Storage/Clean-up
Just as with the preparation, 5th Avenue chocolate bars are low stress when it comes to storage and cleanup. Storage is simple when the candies are kept in their wrapper at room temperature or cooler. Kept cool and out of direct sunlight, these confections have an indefinite shelf life (I bought mine on clearance and they expire at the end of July). However, this candy bar – more than any I have had in recent memory – has a soft chocolate coating that melts in a problematically easy way.
5th Avenue is a very soft candy bar, so it is likely to require you to wash your hands after eating it. Should one of these bars melt onto clothing one is wearing, consult a fabric guide for what removes chocolate from that type of garment. Otherwise, melted 5th Avenue should wipe right off non-porous surfaces with a warm, wet cloth.
Overall
5th Avenue chocolate bars are not healthy and not very good, but outside the aftertaste that is exceptionally dry, there is actually very little wrong with them.
For other Hershey candy reviews, please visit my reviews of:
York Dark Chocolate Covered Peppermint Patties Batty
Reese's Dark Peanut Butter Cups
Cadbury Caramel Egg
4/10
For other food and drink reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!
© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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