Tuesday, February 28, 2012

A Surprisingly Underwhelming Fruit Snack, Peeled Organic’s Cherry-Go-Round Is Just Dried Fruit!


The Good: Very nutritious, Decent shelf life for an organic product.
The Bad: Comparatively expensive, Not terribly flavorful.
The Basics: The Peeled Organics Cherry-Go-Round fruit snacks I had did not impress me, though they are exceptionally nutritious!


It has to be pretty obvious to my regular readers that I am on a health kick at the moment. I am getting fit and improving my health while my wife loses weight, so we can accomplish our goals together and live longer, happier lives. While I still crave a lot of things I am not supposed to have, I have been much better about eating things like fruit. My wife makes me shakes and I’ve been enjoying dried fruits, mostly from Peeled Organic.

Cherry-Go-Round was the first dried fruit from Peeled Organic that simply seemed like a dried fruit. It did not remind me of actual cherries, it reminded me of prunes and raisins and I was entirely underwhelmed. However, because I have been paying so much attention to nutrition of late, I could not entirely pan this dried fruit; after all, as part of getting heart-healthy, dietary fiber has become important to me. This has four grams of that and despite being unremarkable in most ways, that makes it fairly worthwhile to me!

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.

Cherry-Go-Round is just as the name implies; a bag of dehydrated organic cherries! The dehydrated fruit chunks are supple, not hard. They are also not covered in a coating of sugar, wax and/or preservatives. The Cherry-Go-Round fruit snacks comes in a 1.48 oz. stiff plastic bag that is not resealable.

Ease Of Preparation

Cherry-Go-Round fruit packs are simple to use. Simply open the bag and remove the fruit from it! There is no trick to eating Cherry-Go-Round; they are a snack that is ready to go from the bag to the mouth.

Taste

Opening the bag of Cherry-Go-Round fruit snacks, my nose was instantly overrun by a smell reminiscent of prunes. This was the first Peeled Organic fruit snack I can recall that actually smelled like a dried fruit. This smells entirely like prunes!

Cherry-Go-Round, like raisins, have very little flavor when they are first placed on the tongue. Instead, these burst to flavorful life when they are ruptured or chewed. Sweeter than raisins, Cherry-Go-Round fruit snacks have a slight tart kick that reminds us that they are dried cherries. These dried fruits taste more like raisins than anything else and those who were hoping for some form of luscious cherry flavor preserved through dehydration are likely to be underwhelmed by these. I know I was.

Cherry-Go-Round leaves no aftertaste in one’s mouth.

Nutrition

Cherry-Go-Round organic dried fruits are an all-natural snack, with no preservatives or added sugar. Given that the ingredient is organic cherries, there is nothing hiding in them that will surprise consumers. These have a shelf life of about nine months, so they are not bad for stocking up on if you eat a lot of fruit. The package we got on the last day of January (2012) expires on October 5, 2012 (or it would have had I not eaten them all up!).

Each 42 gram serving of Cherry-Go-Round has 130 calories, none of which come from fat. There are four grams of dietary fiber and 20% of your RDA of Vitamin C. Outside that, there are no significant nutrients in a serving, though there is 4% of one’s RDA of 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. This bag of treats also is careful to note that it may contain core and stem fragments. Mine contained none of those undesirable things.

Storage/Clean-up

Kept in their bag, Cherry-Go-Round will remain fresh for almost a year and as long as the bag is sealed, 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. Cherry-Go-Round dried fruits are a dry food and thus leave no mess behind. Simply toss out the plastic bag and cleanup is done! I would, naturally, be happier if there was a way to recycle these plastic bags.

Overall

Cherry-Go-Round is a fruit snack that is solidly below average on taste, but more than makes up for it through the nutritional benefits. They do not taste bad, they just do not impress me with being very flavorful, either.

For other Peeled Organic fruit snack reviews, check out my reviews of:
Apple-2-The-Core
Pine-4-Pineapple
Apricot-a-lot

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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