Butlers Honeycomb Crisp Milk Chocolate

The best thing about running this blog is that everyday I go to bed knowing that there will be more chocolate tomorrow! THERE ARE SO MANY BRANDS AND VARIETIES OUT THERE! Every time a friend returns from a trip abroad or I from the supermarket, there is something new to be eaten, enjoyed and written about. Oh, the world is a sweet, sweet place.

This sweet offering, for instance, has come all the way from Ireland. Butlers was founded in 1932 by an Irishwoman Marion Butler, who initially called it Chez Nous. The small company was based in Dublin and was bought over by Seamus Sorensen in 1959; the Sorensen family still owns this brand. The Butlers brand was born in 1984. Today, the brand's luxurious chocolates are sold in over 35 countries globally, and it is best known for its cafe chain format.

Among its many varieties, is this milk chocolate with an intriguing ingredient - honeycomb! Honey in food, yes. But honeycomb!? I was most curious about how it would taste. The honeycomb (10%), along with rice crispies (5%), has been added to this chocolate for crispness. The result is a wonderfully crunchy bar of chocolate with a hint of honey. But crunch and smoothness apart, the bar is pretty regular.

A consumer won't know what honeycomb tastes like from this bar. I was also disappointed with the excessively sweet milk chocolate. Overly sweet milk chocolates are my biggest problem with Indian milk chocolates as well.

Milk chocolate lovers will quite like this product, but I see no reason why anyone should pick this up over a regular Cadbury Crackle, especially when a 100 g bar costs almost INR 220.

RATING: 3/5

Gandour Safari

I've been dreading this post but I must take my newfound role as a chocolate blogger seriously, no? I've hated Safari for as long as I can remember, but a chocolate as 'popular' as this one had to be reviewed. So I brought home the smallest bar I could find to check if it was still as bad as I remembered it.

Safari is a milk chocolate made by Gandour, a Saudi Arabia-based company that's more than a century old! Gandour makes a range of chocolates (which, I'm pretty sure, are as shitty as Safari), and Safari is one of their most recognised products. It's either me or the Saudi nations just DO NOT KNOW HOW TO MAKE CHOCOLATE! Any and every chocolate product that I've tasted from these countries have scored exactly the same points - ZERO.

Safari is no exception. With a wafer and cereal core and caramel layering, the milk chocolate is covered with rice crispies on the top (which look like warts, urgh!). Sweet as hell, ugly to look at and with an all-over-the-place texture, Safari makes for a terrible gustatory experience. Their only saving grace is the packaging. I couldn't finish even this tiny 20g bar that cost me INR 5, and I never waste chocolate. So yeah, Safari retains its position as the yuckiest of chocolates, at least in my book.

RATING: 1/5

Galaxy Crispy Milk Chocolate

Mars Inc. produces just so many brands of chocolate, that it is impossible for a reviewer to not feature a mars product every few blog posts. Recently, Galaxy chocolates made quite some noise with their TVC featuring a digitally resurrected Audrey Hepburn. 

Like Snickers, Bounty and Mars, Galaxy is a huge selling brand by Mars. Established as early as 1810, Galaxy is recognised and sold the world over, albeit under different names in different countries. While it is sold as Galaxy in the UK, India, Ireland and the Middle East, the brand is marketed as Dove in other parts of the world.

The packaging and product features are exactly the same for both brands. However, Dove is famous for its cute li'l Promises messages inside every chocolate wrapper, which look like this. I wish they'd do it with Galaxy too. 

Anyhow, Galaxy chocolates are fair, with or without the messages. I bought a bar of Galaxy Crispy Milk Chocolate the other day for a review. These chocolates have been around for a while, although I'm not quite sure when they came to India first. The brand was re-launched in major cities in 2011*. 

A typical Galaxy bar looks like this with a G inscribed on the lower right corner of each of its six sections. The milk chocolate is really smooth and lives up to Galaxy's (corny) tagline of 'Why have cotton when you can have silk? It has rice crispies for the crunch, like crispy chocolate from any brand. The product is sweet like standard milk chocolate and stands out only because of its smoothness.

My only problem with Galaxy chocolates is that they melt very easily at (Indian) room temperatures. In their defence, however, they mention the ideal storing temperature as 18-22 degrees C. However, how has that stopped anyone from forgetting they had a bar in their handbag or in the office drawer just above the always on computer processor?

So one often ends up with a very messy blob of Galaxy chocolate. However, when you've paid just INR 20 for a 36 g bar of essentially foreign chocolate, you don't feel too bad.

RATING: 3/5