ION Milk Chocolate With Almonds

It’s been a while since I reviewed any Greek chocolate, so I thought I’d delve into my chocolate stash and find one of the bars sent to us by reader George Loumakis.

According to George, this bar is “an absolute classic in Greece, arguably the most popular chocolate bar here and has been around since the 1950’s totally unchanged”.

So is it any good, or is it just something that’s popular because it’s always been around?

As you can see, it’s a fairly ordinary looking block. It doesn’t look particularly classy – even the typeface the chunks are embossed with looks a little cheap.

The 28% milk chocolate is very sweet and not particularly great. There’s no nasty vegetable oils in it, but I detected a slightly artificial flavour to it. But something interesting happens when you bite into one of the small almond chunks – they suddenly release their flavour and when combined with the chocolate, the overall taste becomes similar to that of a Snickers bar. Sweet, nutty, chocolatey and really quite moreish.

There’s really nothing special about it, but then there’s nothing special about the KitKats, Mars Bars and Bountys of this world either, but they sell in their millions. And I think that’s why this bar succeeds. It’s a cheap, tasty snack. It’s certainly not a gourmet product and I wouldn’t buy it now – but I don’t think I would have complained to find a bar in my lunch box as a kid either.