Nestlé Crunch Crisp Bar

There’s something hypnotic about the TV ad for the new Nestlé Crunch Crisp bar, wherein disparate layers of cookie wafers, milk chocolate, and mysterious white “airy crispies” are magically assembled into one united candy product. In part, it’s probably because watching anything get assembled layer by layer in a computer-animated fashion is compelling, but the appeal of the ad also stems from the fact that this bar clearly comes out swinging on the crispy front. No joking around, no sandy-tasting Twix crispiness or halfhearted, muted crispiness of the standard Nestlé Crunch. This is a crispiness jihad, bursting with the fierce earnestness of a company determined to crisp the dickens out of its product.

The Crisp bar has sharply divided online candy bar critics. Chocolate Obsession calls it “the horrific love child of a Nestlé Crunch and Kit Kat,” and one of the blog’s comments pithily observes: “It taste[s] more like X-LAX than CANDY.” (A bon mot about a bad bonbon!) Candy Addict, by contrast, declares it a “really great snacking experience” and hails the “quite tasty” wafer cookie component.

When stacked up against its lowbrow gas station checkout counter brethren, the Nestlé Crunch Crisp bar acquits itself heroically. The multiple wafer layers (topped with crispies) give the illusion of a bar that’s much larger and more elegant than it is. And the chocolate cream/chocolate coating layers, while not of Scharffen Berger quality, aren’t bad. We've kneecapped countless other experimental mass-market products for tinkering with successful formulae and screwing everything up. Here, happily, a bit of industrial experimentation created something tasty.

Source chow.com