Unibic Choco Kiss Cookies

Everyone's riding the centre-filled cookie wave, and the latest brand to join the bandwagon is Unibic. This Australian brand has been in India since 2004, and today has a wide pan-Indian reach through a number of products distributed through supermarkets and local retail stores. Given the variety of products, I'm surprised this is turning out to be the first review of a Unibic product.

It is, however, no surprise that their centre-filled cookies, called Choco Kiss caught my eye since everyone is making these and the category seems to be doing really well. So far, I've reviewed Sunfeast's Dark Fantasy Choco Fills, Sunfeast's Dark Fantasy Choco Meltz, Parle's Golden Arcs Choco Filled Rolls. The Unibic Choco Kiss cookies resembles Sunfeast's primary offering in this category, Dark Fantasy Choco Fills more than any other.

It's a plain cookie filled with liquid chocolate in the centre and scores over Parle's product, which has a gooey, but not runny chocolate filling. While Unibic's chocolate filling doesn't score too high on taste, one has to give it points for a very crumbly cookie. However, Sunfeast trumps both in terms of an overall taste experience.

Unibic's Choco Kiss Cookies are individually packed and a 75g box comprises six cookies. Priced at INR 35, each cookie comes to about Rs. 5.80. This makes it the costliest product in the category as compared to Rs 5 apiece for Sunfeast's Choco Fills and Rs 3 apiece for Parle's Golden Arcs Choco Rolls. Sunfeast's Choco Meltz is a more premium product with a chocolate coating on the outside and is priced around Rs. 7 per piece. Unibic, therefore, needs to find another USP if it is to pose any real competition to the existing players. For now, though, they can be happy with one happy tiny customer.

RATING: 3/5

Parle Golden Arcs Choco Filled Rolls

This curiously unbranded product has been in the market for a while now and thanks to its promoted page on Facebook, has a great fan following. What I want to know is why Parle doesn't want its name stated clearly on the packet. It may have to do with Parle's primary positioning as a 'affordable confectioneries' brand, and Golden Arcs doesn't exactly fall in that category. Although at INR 35 for a 150 g pack is cheap, it is definitely not in the Parle G category - a product most associated with Parle.

Golden Arcs obviously wants to compete with the chocolate-filled cookie category, which has become very popular lately, with products such as Sunfeast's Choco Fills entering the market. Golden Arcs is much more competitively priced and will offer stiff competition to high priced products in the segment. Not to forget, it offers a number of fruit flavoured varieties, as opposed to the competition that offers only chocolate.

As for quality, they aren't far behind, though the packaging is a little sloppy. The plastic tray inside my pack was breaking apart, as you can see in the picture above. But the pack is designed well and looks premium.

The product itself is also decent, shaped square with a crunchy and not-too-dense cookie exterior. The inside is filled with gooey chocolate, which is rather sweet to taste. But the biscuit and chocolate come together well and make for a decent enough product. While Parle's Golden Arcs aren't quite at par with Choco Fills, their pricing point is their winner. Chocosophy recommends!

RATING: 3/5

Nestle Bono Chocolate Biscuit

This one seems to have travelled all the way from Brasil to my local supermarket and to my kitchen and into my mouth. And boy, what a wasted trip! I picked up a pack of Nestle Bono impressed by the fancy packaging, and also because I haven't reviewed imported chocolate biscuits in a while. And what a pity that Nestle, Brasil should dent the brand's image with this sorry product.

So, beneath this pretty pack are some of the lousiest chocolate sandwich biscuits I've reviewed. The cookie is overdone, and that makes it taste slightly burnt. It might be a faulty batch, but that's just too bad. One would expect stringent quality control from a brand this big. 

Coming to the cream, there's very little of it in every sandwich. The layer of dark-ish chocolate is so thin in the sandwich that the taste hardly registers. So I did what all good children should do; licked the cream straight off the cookie and that didn't impress me much either. A complete waste for my INR 50 for a 200 g pack. So, here's rating it poorly for taste, value for money and quality.

RATING: 1.5/5

Sunfeast Dream Cream Bourbon biscuits

I've said this before and I'll say it again, ITC's Sunfeast is not the best of biscuit brands barring one or two exceptional products. ITC forayed into the biscuit market almost nine years ago with the brand Sunfeast and has since expanded to include pastas and instant noodles in their profile, but it might never catch up with the Nestles, Parles, and the Britannias of the world. Why? Because they've consistently made below par products like this one.

Sunfeast has replicated all popular biscuit types including Marie, Nice, and Bourbon. The Dream Cream Bournbon Delight is your typical chocolate cream sandwich biscuits with a sprinkling of sugar on the top layer.

As you can see, the amount of cream is quite meager and they don't look too good either. The taste is just as average. There's no reason why anyone would pick up a Dream Cream Bourbon over a Bourbon biscuit of some other brand, except maybe because they were the first things one saw on a supermarket shelf.

Sunfeast is probably worried about keeping the price on the lower side for affordability's sake, but the quality is compromised. At INR 12 for a 75 g pack, they are very easy on the pocket, and also perfectly forgettable.


RATING: 2.5/5

Sunfeast Dark Fantasy Choco Fills

"Savour the taste of bliss as you bite into the new Sunfeast Dark Fantasy Choco Fills biscuit. The sun-baked rich crust enrobes the purest of smooth choco cream made to mesmerise your tastebuds..."

This copywriter for ITC Sunfeast's Dark Fantasy Choco Fills box really needs to take it easy. I know nothing about baking, but I find it hard to believe that these biscuits are left out in the sun to bake. That's what sun-baked means, right?

Although, a fan of Sunfeast's other Dark Fantasy product, I wasn't impressed with the Choco Fills. Perhaps I expected too much because everyone seems to be going gaga about it. While it is the first of its kind in the cookie/biscuit segment with a 'liquid' filling, the end result isn't anything to write home about.

I was disappointed mostly because the creamy chocolate filling inside isn't dark enough, and the cookie is sweet too, making the product a little cloying. However, it must be praised for the consistency, as the cookie is crunchy, and the filling perfectly creamy. The individual packaging for each piece helps maintain its freshness, though it may come across as wasteful to some.

A 75 g box costs INR 30 and has six biscuits in it, which makes it Rs. 5 per piece. Rather expensive for a biscuit, I say, but okay for an occasional treat.

RATING: 3/5

Parle Hide & Seek

First things first, Parle's Hide & Seek cookies will never qualify as 'cookies' in my eyes, because only round and crumbly and buttery things can be called that. And secondly, they are definitely not the 'World's Best Moulded Chocolate Chip Cookies', but they're good in a way all things with chocolate are. Wikipedia defines moulded cookies as those... 'made from a stiffer dough that is moulded into balls or cookie shapes by hand before baking.

Moulded into balls or no balls, Hide & Seek is one consistent product. Since they launched a few years ago, I've consumed packets of these and they've always been the same. Slightly hard textured, but perfectly crunchy, these 'biscuits' have the right amount of chocolate chips in them to give them full flavour. The biscuit is mostly sweet, and the chocolate is just a tad dark, making for a good combination.

Parle's Hide & Seek is available in INR 5, 10, 20, 30 or 50 packets, and are perfect to go either with hot beverages or eaten by themselves. I like.

RATING: 3/5

Sunfeast Dark Fantasy Chocolate

Because biscuits, especially chocolate cream biscuits, are forbidden to those that huff and puff about with weights in the gymnasium every morning, these are a staple in my larder. Between fitness and chocolate things, there's no question about who wins. So, carrying forth my streak of shamelessness into the New Year (resolutions be damned), I tucked into one of these with my morning chai. And mmm...

Sunfeast's Dark Fantasy Chocolate have got to be one of the best chocolate cream biscuits in the market. I'd even say they are better than the much-hyped Oreos. ITC has nailed it with this star product among its array of consumables manufactured under the Sunfeast banner. In fact, it inspired a host of similar products by competitive brands*. Before Dark Fantasy, most Sunfeast products I had tried were lame, despite Shah Rukh Khan crying hoarse about their goody-goodness.

These chocolate biscuits sandwiching the chocolate cream are quite divine. The biscuits are beautifully dark, and the cream wonderfully smooth. The degree of sweetness is just right and I'm obviously partial to them. The standard 96 g pack has about 6-7 biscuits and is priced at Rs. 25, which some might find a little steep. But what's 25 rupees to indulge your dark fantasies, I say? :)

Happy 2013, folks!

RATING: 4/5

*Britannia's Pure Magic

Britannia Bourbon Cappuccino

Because chocolate biscuits are the natural fallback for a chocoholic in the absence of the real thang, here comes my first review of the quintessential chocolate biscuit - the bourbon. This variety by Britannia is, however, of the cappuccino flavour. And it is good like all things coffee. 

Priced at Rs. 10, the 50 g pack has four cream sandwich biscuits in it with that fancy-schmancy plastic tray in which the biscuits break anyway. Although it is shaped square, unlike the usual rectangular bourbon biscuits, it has the age old sprinkling of sugar. But broken or not, the biscuits are Britannia perfect with the correct amount of browning and crunch. The chocolate cream is sufficiently coffee-ish, but sweet to a fault. Dunkers will like it only if their chai ki shakkar levels can rival the biscuit's. Go for it, I say.

RATING: 3.5/5