Taste Test: Whole Foods' 365 Organic Fruit Strips
Whole Foods sells a line of organic fruit strips through their house brand, 365, in peach, cherry, blueberry, very berry, cranberry, and strawberry flavors. While the experience of eating these will never pass for biting into a fresh piece of fruit, they're full of real fruit flavor, are all-natural, tender, chewy, and not nearly as leathery as most of their competitors. We had the opportunity to try them all, and were pleasantly surprised.
The main ingredient in all of these strips is apples, so there's obviously plenty of apple flavor in each of them, which isn't a bad thing. Don't be turned off by the brownish hue, either; that's the color of real dried fruit. There's a lot of peach flavor in the peach strip, which was our favorite of the bunch. Next came cherry, which smells like fresh cherry but tastes a little more like apple than cherry. The blueberry flavored bar tastes more like blueberry than it smells, but still doesn't smack you in the face with blueberry flavor. The very berry was our second-favorite of the bunch, full of flavor from a combination of strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and cranberries. The cranberry was tangy but wasn't obviously cranberry-flavored, and the strawberry had a very solid strawberry kick.
These fruit strips are just that: fruit, dried and compressed into stick form. They're about as simple and wholesome as it gets, with no preservatives or stabilizers (the cherry, for example, contains only apple, natural flavor, and fruit juice concentrate). As a solid after-school snack in place of candy, a piece of real fruit is obviously the best thing to have. These come in a close second, though.