Product Review: Kroger's The Truly Awesome™ Homestyle Chocolate Chip Cookies

As a BzzAgent, I accepted the campaign for Kroger's The Truly Awesome™ Homestyle Chocolate Chip Cookies in exchange for an honest review. My daughter and I opened a box just minutes after its arrival and enjoyed them with a glass of cold milk. These cookies are almost "sandy" in texture with a light flavor, which make them an excellent dip-in-milk cookie but it lacks that butter-rich, softer texture that we prefer in a chocolate chip cookie. On the box, one of the suggestions is to microwave the cookies for a few minutes for that fresh out of the oven sensation. I do not own a microwave (I just do not believe in radiating my food) so I do not know how well that would work.

On the front of the box there are three claims and I would like to address these in particular:

CHOCOLATE CHIPS ARE THE #1 INGREDIENT
According to the list of ingredients on the side of the box, that is true. This is one of the best features of the cookies. You just cannot go wrong with having lots of chocolate chips in a chocolate chip cookie.

MADE WITH REAL BUTTER
Although there is butter in the ingredients, it is low on the list: chocolate chips, flour, margarine, sugar, brown sugar, butter, eggs, leavening, natural flavor, and salt. Did you notice the amount of margarine was far more than the amount of butter? It seems to me that real butter was added only as a sales gimmick.

NO ADDED PRESERVATIVES OR ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS
Technically, as stated on the list of ingredients, citric acid is a preservative, although a natural one, which is added the making of the added margarine. I suppose I am being nick-picky to point out that margarine itself is an unnatural ingredient, but then the claim was not that the cookies were all natural.

On the back of the box:

JUST LIKE HOMEMADE, THESE IRRESISTIBLE COOKIES ARE BURSTING WITH CHOCOLATE CHIPS AND ARE MADE WITH RICH, CREAMY BUTTER FOR AN OVER-THE-TOP MELT IN YOUR MOUTH CHOCOLATE, CRUNCH DELIGHT.
They are really selling the butter! Too bad they did not use enough butter to give it that real homemade quality. Most of that butter flavor must be coming from the butter flavoring added in the margarine.

Overall, I would not refuse to eat one if offered--the chocolate chips are definitely the better selling point--but this one is not a cookie I would choose to buy. Putting aside that they are not organic, at $2.79 for a package of eight large cookies, it just seems a tad pricy for cookies made mostly with margarine and just a smack of butter.

I also have a suggestion because the packaging is not appealing, not at all. It is plain and does not sell the product. Also, blue is a color that suppresses hunger--ever notice that no natural foods are blue? Blue and white are not the colors to use predominately on a food package to get people to want to buy it, even if they are the store's logo colors.