World of Snacks was created so our family and friends could explore the world through it’s sweet and salty treats. Over the last year we have spent time analyzing snacks from 30 different countries. At the first of this year we opened our international snack store to the world. We now offer the best British Snacks for sale in the United States with shipping around the world. Each month following we will add a new country and their snacks to our inventory. The focus of our international snack blog is to find inventory for our store. Today, we are back in Ireland reviewing some gourmet chocolates that we are very excited to be sampling. These special Irish chocolates that we are examining are produced by Lily O’Brien. The company was initially founded in 1992 in the O’Brien’s kitchen with only a wooden spoon and a passion for chocolate. Today the company is one of Ireland’s most recognized global brands and has export sales that make up 75% of their volume. Although they are famous at home, Lily O’Brien also sells products throughout the UK, USA, Australia, Sweden and more. Although to be honest, here in the USA this is our first experience of this Irish Snack. Although they offer a variety of chocolaty options we are examining the Lily O’Brien’s Gourmet Irish Chocolate Gifts. They have a range of keepsake, personalized, and wedding gifts. Our sample is a massive Christmas Keepsake gift package. It comes with their whole lineup of chocolates in a variety of individually wrapped gift packages. The idea is to buy the keepsake box, open it up, give out gifts of gourmet Irish chocolate to everyone your have ever met, and keep the massive container for yourself. Well, that is our take on it. Although the box offers a wide size of gift options, we dove into the biggest and divided it up for our review panel. Our box contained three trays of 30 chocolates, for those who don’t feel like doing math, that’s 90 chocolates! In this massive sub-box of our giant larger keepsake gift box there were 10 different flavors of the Irish chocolate. To prevent the need to create our first international snack novel, we are going to examine each with just a very quick summary. So for your snack research pleasure, here is our nearly tweet friendly review of Lily O’Brien’s Gourmet Irish Chocolate Gifts. First up was the Double Chocolate Truffle. Filled with a velvet smooth 55% dark chocolate and encased in a hard shell 68% dark chocolate this dark on dark combination created a well blended creamy treat that for some reason has a hint of orange. Simply Chocolate was just as the name implies. This Irish snack was a blend of both white and dark chocolate and was a firm and a little hard. Very enjoyable, but the most solid version offered by Lily O’Brien. Le Crunch Chocolat tastes a lot like an American crunch bar that has been re-engineered into a gourmet Irish chocolate. The crunch comes from a French biscuit. Not the USA version of a biscuit though, the cookie kind. My personal favorite was the Lemon Meringue Pie. WOW! This tastes like a fresh lemon meringue pie coated in outrageously delicious Irish milk chocolate. Praline Perfection offered a perfectly presented white chocolate cup outer shell with a praline and smooth chocolate center. The nut was a little small, but the treat had big flavor. Caramel Mocchiato caught us off guard. Generally coffee and chocolate candy can come off a little weak. The coffee in Lily O’Brien’s chocolate was perfect, with a nearly fresh ground taste. In addition to being snack lovers, we are very serious coffee and consumers and to be wowed by a snack version is rare. We are not new to orange chocolate; in fact this is our third review featuring this combination. However, out of the three this snack, the Zesty Orange Chocolate was our least favorite rendition. The orange was a strange firm jelly and there were rind pieces on top? Not our favorite Irish gourmet chocolate for sure. Hazelnut O’Brien was our female tasters favorite, minus the nut. I personally enjoyed the nut, so I ate hers too! The mouse like filling is divine and the white chocolate layer on top rounds this snack out well. Their classic Sticky Toffee gave me an instant sugar rush, in fact we are 30 minutes post review and I am still high on sugar. The toffee is the best I have ever tasted. Our female taster was not a fan but all other truly enjoyed this chocolate snack. Last but not least, Death by Chocolate. This one left us wanting more. The bold name oversold the item. Or maybe it was because we just consumed 9 other delicious treats. The taste took awhile to come together and it was enjoyable but lacked wow factor. There you have it. This is our longest snack review to date! Will World of Snacks offer Lily O’Brien’s Gourmet Irish Chocolate Gifts for sale online? Not at the moment. They have a decent export set up and offer the sale of their snacks right on their website. We may be interested in gift items in the future and if we extend our international snack store to include items like this we will revisit with this Irish snack brand. Hungry for snacks? Head over and buy British Chocolates online now or leave your details to the right to be notified as we expand our inventory.
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We are back snacking for this week's installment of our international snacks blog in the Kingdom of Sweden. This is our third snack review for this European country and so far we have loved everything we have tasted! Will our review of Ballerina Cookies by Goteborgs compare to our previous reviews of Dalecarlia Chocolate Horses and Cloetta Kexchoklad? Let's get down to it and find out. Goteborgs Kex and it's parent company, Norwegian Orkia, are the largest supper of brand goods for convince stores in both Norway and Sweden. Gorteborgs Kex controls about 50 percent of the market share for cookies in Sweden alone. Goteborgs offers an assortment of 50 loved brands and products in addition to the Ballerina cookies. Although the company is a Sweden based snack conglomerate, it initial got it start way back in 1888 by a businessman named Carl Leopoid. I don't imagine Carl could have imagined that his business exploits would grow into such a vast empire. Our sample product for our review of Ballerina Cookies by Goteborgs is a shinny red sleeve that weighs in at 6.3oz. The package is completely in English and contains yellow text that reads Ballerina cookies with chocolate hazelnut cream filling. In addition to this there is a blue oval that reads Goteborgs. But enough with how they look! How do Ballerina Cookies by Goteborg taste? I have to admit, the packaging highlighting the cream filling poking through the cookie did get me excited. I am a big fan of fudge and cookie combinations and my favorite cookie in the US is the E.L. Fudge cookies by Keebler that come in a fun Elfin shape. The Ballerina cookies however are just circular, and do in no way resemble an actual ballerina! After ripping open the package I realized that the cookies are offer two halves and include hazlenut chocolate poking through the top and in between the two layers of cookies, one white and the other brown. This is not something I expected but it was a welcome surprise. My first taste of the Ballerina Cookies from Sweden was not quite what I hoped. Like many of the previous cookies from Europe that we have sampled the cookie part of the treat was just not as sweet as a typical American snack. With that being said after a few more bites (and cookies) I was hooked. Our taste test panel included two others tonight and they both loved the cookie from the first bite! They did not miss the sweet overpowering flavor of an American snack and thought Goteborgs had the cookie formula perfected. Will Ballerina Cookies be offered as a part of our Sweden Snack inventory when we launch our World of Snack store later this year? You bet they will! We are nearly 100% positive that you will be able to buy Ballerina Cookies by Goteborgs as a part of our normal inventory. Our following is growing rapidly and our inventory selection is moving along smoothly. If you know anyone who you think would enjoy our international snack blog or buying snacks from around the world please be sure to share our page!
After yesterday’s article on Nongshim Shrimp Flavored Crackers we decided to head right back into a sweet treat for today’s snack review. Our Global Snack Blog is off to Northern Europe, Sweden to be exact. It was our 10 year old Director of Taste's turn to choose the snack and he went right for a candy bar with a shinny yellow and red wrapper produced by a company called Cloetta.
Cloetta has a long history in it’s home of Sweden that dates way back to 1872 when two brothers got together to make some candy. Their first treat to the market was a licorice and many more followed after. Today they have two facilities and approximately 730 employees. They produce several top selling and well loved snacks or confectioneries as they like to call them. Today we are taking a look at one of their best sellers, Cloetta Kexchoklad. Kexchoklad was initially introduced in the 1920s and was known as “Five O’clock Biscuit Chocolate.” Luckily for everyone Cloetta changed to it’s current name in 1938, which translates simply to Chocolate Biscuit. This classic chocolate candy is known and loved by 9 out of 10 Swedes and as of this review several Americans! Since we’ve created World of Snacks we have sampled some great chocolate candy bars from many international markets and so far this is one of my personal favorites. Other than the simple look when removed from the package everything just seemed right. The bar itself wasn’t pleasing to the eye but it’s great flavor and textures more than made up for it. The chocolate coating was milky and sweet, the internal wafers were crisp and light, and the filling in between the wafers was creamy and enjoyable. The only flavor that caught me off guard was the wafer itself Although crunchy and gratifying on my first bite I took note that it tasted more like a saltine cracker than a typical wafer used in a candy bar. After the second bite I was hooked on its non-sweet crunch that was layered and covered in plenty of delicious chocolate sweetness to compensate. Every member of our test group truly enjoyed the Kexchoklad. Will our US based international snack company offer Cloetta Kexchoklad? Of course! I personally am already craving another and had to fight my son for the last piece! |
The Snack Blog
Follow along as we explore cookies, cakes, candies, chips, crackers, and nuts from all across the world. Many of the international snacks that we highlight will be offered in our store over the course of the next year. We currently offer British Snacks, American Snacks, German Snacks, Mexican Snacks, Filipino Snacks, Japanese Kit Kats, Pakistani Snacks, Italian Snacks, & Korean Snacks. Each month this year we will add a new country and their best snacks inventory. Shop
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May 2018
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