With the Healthy Choice Cuban-Inspired Pork Bowl, it’s very likely we’re saying goodbye to the Healthy Choice brand once and for all. What follows is going to be less of a review and more of a consumer alert: Healthy Choice’s Power Bowls are so poorly designed that they should be pulled from store shelves as soon as possible. This sounds like an exaggeration, but we assure you it’s not.
We’ve had bad experiences with Healthy Choice Power Bowls in the past. What tends to happen when we cook these things is that they get all dried out and turn into a pile of rock-hard, inedible bits. The first time this happened, we considered it a fluke. The second time, however, we became concerned that this was a trend with Healthy Choice’s Power Bowls.
Now we’ll move onto our third horrible experience with the brand: the Healthy Choice Cuban-Inspired Pork Bowl. This one was so bad that it almost started a fire in our kitchen. No seriously, look at the picture below.
Here’s what happened: we read the cooking instructions, which said to put this into the microwave for three and a half to four and a half minutes. We went with the latter, but before this was done, we started smelling smoke. At about the three-minute mark, this thing had already started smoking. Had we given it the full four and a half minutes, we would have almost certainly started a fire.
We’re not alone here; it turns out, if you read the product page for this Power Bowl, there’s a review that talks about another customer having a similar issue.
Now, the past two times we ended up with a dried-out, inedible Power Bowl, we rushed out to the store to buy a fresh one so we could actually try to review it. This time, we’re not giving Healthy Choice another chance. The “three strikes and you’re out” rule works in baseball, and we think it should work for Healthy Choice meals as well. We’ve given Healthy Choice too much slack already, and they need to give their product a serious redesign before we even consider taking another one of these frozen meals home again.
The Healthy Choice Cuban-Inspired Pork Bowl is not a meal; it’s a safety hazard. This is not fit for human consumption — heck, it’s not fit for consumption by anything except maybe a dumpster fire. We’re not sure we’ll be reviewing any Healthy Choice Meals after this.
If for some reason you still care about the alleged nutritional information or ingredients in this disaster of a frozen food, check out our package scans below.
I eat the Healthy Choice power bowls on a regular basis and have never experienced anything like what you describe. You have an issue with your microwave. Absurd “review.”
I feel like they’re not taking the plastic off; if i recall it does say that
Three years later, we’re still using the same microwave. We’ve reviewed 1,800 frozen meals at this point, and this is the only one that literally started on fire in our microwave.
Considering we had previously tried a Power Bowl that was all dried out (but didn’t start a fire), we think this is probably a flaw in the packaging. It’s also very possible that Healthy Choice fixed this by now.
are you leaving the plastic on the bowls as directed? I see no mention of leaving the plastic on
These specific bowls do not have plastic on them. They have a thin papery film that covers the bowl, and generally that film comes detached from the bowl if you so much as look at it wrong. We’re guessing that this design flaw in the package causes them to dry out in the freezer really quickly.
It’s possible that Healthy Choice has addressed this design flaw by now (this review was posted in January of 2019), but we haven’t tried this particular meal since then so we can’t say for sure.