Cadbury Chomp (Australia)

This is a blast from the past. Chomp bars were everywhere here in the late seventies and eighties and were one of the cheapest chocolate bars you could buy. Still are in fact and a mother at my daughter’s school confided that these are her favourite naughty treats.

‘Confided’ is the right word because she’s probably about 25 years too old for the main Chomp target market unless she has a liking for cartoonish wrappers featuring a deranged mechanical dinosaur on the side and only seven measly percent cocoa solids.

This secretive mother is also on the trim side, so maybe I should not have been surprised to see how stingy the chocolate coating was on the bar when it was unwrapped. Half of it was so thin it was already cracking and falling off.

Then again, a glance beyond the cartoons revealed that it’s covered in the dreaded C word. No, not carob, but compounded chocolate. Still, I chomped on. It tasted chewy and sweet with a hint of salt in the caramel mix, building up to a powerhouse of sweetness that had me reaching for a glass of water. Or two. The chocolate was the least noticeable aspect being comprehensively overtaken by the intense sugar punch that was so mighty it made my fillings ache.

There’s supposed to be some wafer in there somewhere, but like the confounded compounded chocolate it was completely lost amongst the challengingly chewy caramel filling that left a slight metallic after taste.

This is best left to the kids, or better still, avoided entirely unless you’re completely starving and don’t have enough money to buy a better bar. In which case, wait until you get home and eat some better quality chocolate and encourage your kids to do the same. Life is too short to waste on a painfully sweet second-rate mess that still throws nearly six grams of fat at you even though it’s only a tiny 30 gram bar.

Not surprisingly, Cadbury don’t exactly put their brand anywhere prominent on this label, instead hiding their identity in miniscule print just about the sealed fold at the back. In even smaller print, they write: “Cadbury Means Quality.” Nope, not in this case it doesn’t.