Bear Naked Custom Made Granola Review

One of the better perks of running a food blog, or any blog for that matter, is the receiving of emails from folks and companies that want you to try out and review their products. I’ve done some of this in the past. I reviewed a sports supplement, some motorcycle foot pegs, laundry detergent and a few food items. I’ll tell you, there’s nothing like receiving something in the mail that was given to you for free. Especially if it’s food. That’s for sure.

As I side note, I’m happy to review Carhart clothing. If anyone is reading and would like to send me some of that, I’ll surely accept it. I also review ATVs. And electronics. Oh, the list goes on.

I opened my email box a few days ago to find a pleasant note from a person named Jeff. He’s on the team at a company called Bear Naked Granola. Basically, Jeff asked if I’d like to give their custom made granola mixture a try and then report my findings back to him as well as share them on this site. I, of course, agreed. So, in this post, I’ll be telling you all about my experience. I’ll also share some photos I just took of the package I received. Nice photos, I might add. This stuff isn’t very difficult to take pictures of.

After receiving the code in my response from Jeff, I visited the Bear Naked website to begin the process of picking the ingredients I’d like included in the granola mix. Bear Naked offers a granola base and approximately 50 additional ingredients you can choose from. Each mixture includes three of those additional ingredients. I thought this was pretty clever, considering the fact that you could order a different combination every day for the rest of your life. If you’re the type of person who enjoys granola and who gets bored easily, I think this product might tickle your fancy.

The order process takes only a few steps. You first start off with the intro on their website.

Then, after clicking the Start button, you choose which granola base you’d like to have. I believe I chose the Cacao + Cashew Butter.

After that, you simply choose from their 50 ingredients to create your custom blend. In reality, the process couldn’t be more simple.

If memory serves, I chose the three ingredients I thought would be the farthest out there. I wanted to see how the combination would taste. These three ingredients were the dried black olives, lavender and green tea matcha powder. More on the results further down.

For the next few steps, you can choose which bear you’d like on the can the granola is shipped in and what name is placed on the bag for the blend. This is actually a really good idea for a gift, since you can customize pretty much everything. I’ll show you a screenshot of the bears you can select from.

I chose Bodie.

Finally, you go through the cart and pay and then wait for your granola in the mail. The granola is around $10 and shipping is free. Again, this is perfect for gift giving, since you can change it up so many times.

That’s it for the purchase process. Now I’ll get to the actual granola.

After a few days, I found a box in my mailbox. Here’s what the box looks like. There’s no issues with identifying who it’s from.

I hope the mail lady read the box carefully and not only the big lettering. She probably thinks we’re doing something strange in here. Haha.

I opened the box and found a nice thank you note along with the can of granola.

Here’s a photo of just the can. I told you this stuff wasn’t very challenging to photograph. It just looks good.

I took the top of the tube off and pulled the bag of granola out.

The bag of granola weighs in at 11 ounces.

At first, I couldn’t find the name of the blend. I thought it would be on the tube itself, but it wasn’t. I finally found it on the bag. Can you guess what I named it?

That’s right. Pretty cool, huh?

Really, there was only one thing left to do and that was to try it. I opened the bag and poured some of the mixture into a small bowl. Before tasting it, I wanted to make sure I had a good shot of the product itself. Here is that shot.

You can definitely see the different ingredients in the mix.

Now, I’m going to be honest with you here. I’m not the biggest granola guy. I haven’t eaten granola in years and when I have, I probably stole it from someone. It’s not the first thing I go for when I’m food shopping, if you get what I’m saying. I’ll also tell you that if someone had a bowl of this mix sitting somewhere, I’d steal it from them too. It’s pretty damn addictive.

I didn’t know if I was going to like it at first. After all, I picked some wacky ingredients. Laura says that she can taste the lavender the most, but I disagree. I can taste the olives and the chocolate. The olives are my favorite by far. They’re dehydrated and contain their trademark saltiness.

The best way to eat this is not by picking through it for individual ingredients, but by the handful. That’s where the addictiveness stems from – eating the combination all at once. Very good.

To sum up, here’s my overall review. I like the product. I can see that someone or someones definitely put tons of thought into the process, presentation and packaging. They also put the same thought into the product. I like the way the options are endless and by the time you make your final available combination, you’ll likely have forgotten about the first one you ever made. You can just start over again. That’s appealing to me. I can also appreciate the way you can customize the packaging because, as I said earlier, this product is ripe and ready for the holiday season.

If you know someone who is a granola addict, you’ll surely want to introduce them to this site (Bear Naked Custom Granola). They can use the coupon code of READ023 to receive a 10% discount.

Lastly, I’d like to thank Jeff for reaching out to me. I enjoyed reviewing this product and I’m hopeful there will be many more to review in the future. Thanks for reading!