It’s a strange day in the Freezer Meal Frenzy office. You see, normally, a frozen food review website wouldn’t deal with dry snack food, but we recently discovered the Trader Joe’s PB & J Snack Duo and we’re dying to try them out. Even though this isn’t a frozen food, we figured our readers might still be curious about them. In fact, some of our readers might have spotted these at their local Trader Joe’s and thought to themselves, “Hmm, I wonder what the Freezer Meal Frenzy team would think about these snacks.”
Well, we certainly don’t want to disappoint those readers, so we owe it to them to bend our rules a little bit. And really, it’s not like we haven’t reviewed dry goods before (like the Devour mac and cheese cups).
Plus, we hate to say it, but if you really have a problem with a frozen food site getting a little experimental and checking out some non-frozen foods, you might want to stop taking things so seriously and learn to loosen up a bit. We have reviewed about 1,500 frozen items, so you can go read any of those reviews if non-frozen food offends you. Here’s a review that you might be interested in, since it’s a frozen peanut-butter-and-jelly-style dessert.
Anyway, one of the benefits of eating a dry snack food like this rather than a frozen meal is that there’s no prep time. Just crack open a package and dig in.
Inside one box, you’ll find six packets of PB & J snack sticks. Each packet contains eight peanut butter sticks and a dollop of what the packaging refers to as raspberry fruit dip.
The sticks are pretty tasty, featuring a crispy shell that’s filled with peanut butter. On their own, they taste pretty darn good. But once you dip them in the raspberry fruit dip, things really get wild.
Now, we’re resisting the urge to call this a jelly or a jam. It’s packed with seeds, making it more like a jam than a jelly, but it’s also drier and more sticky than you’d expect a jam to be. That stickiness does make the dipping process easier, but it doesn’t provide that stark contrast with the peanut butter that a wetter jam would. Still, we can’t really complain here.
The portion size of the fruit dip is satisfactory. we found it to be the right amount, though true dip fanatics might wish there were a little bit more. We thought there was just enough to get a good-sized gob on the end of your peanut butter stick before eating the whole stick without dipping a second time.
These aren’t really a diet food. With 270 calories per snack pack, on top of the fact that these are a snack food and not any sort of meal, you might want to go easy on the PB and J treats. You definitely don’t want to go through a whole box in a sitting.
The Trader Joe’s PB & J Snack Duo makes for a great snack to pack in a lunchbox or keep on hand for an after-school snack for your kids. They taste great, and the peanut-butter-and-jam combo is a time-tested classic.
To learn more about the nutrition content and ingredients in this Trader Joe’s snack food, check out our package scan below.