Shock! Production staff eat healthy snack!

Working here on the production desk is not a great way to stay slim.

Deadlines mean we sometimes miss, rush or postpone lunches, which encourages us to snack. Our lovely freelancers often bring in cakes and other treats to, erm, keep us sweet. And at Christmas, even the manufacturers in the industry we cover send us goodies (or rather, send the writers goodies and they filter down to us).

Recently I kept a record of all the bad snacks to appear over the course of a working week:

Monday: Wine gums
Tuesday: Doughnuts, liquorice allsorts and Maltesers
Wednesday: Little Guylian chocolates and a giant Cadbury Fruit & Nut chocolate bar
Thursday: Biscuits (I was on a training course)
Friday: Mini Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolates

And they wasn't even a particularly bad week.

So when, through Fuelmyblog, I was sent some suspiciously healthy-sounding 'mixed seed bars with hemp' to review, I decided to share them with some of my production colleagues.

The bars in question were '9 Bar Original' from Wholebake and here's what my workmates thought:

Design editor: "It's rather nice."
Group art & production editor*: "I've had these before, they're lovely."
Digital assistant: "It tastes like a Tracker bar."
Group art and production editor (again): "No it doesn't!"

Back home, my girlfriend jokingly asked whether they would get her stoned (there's a big picture of a hemp leaf on the packet, as you can see from the picture below). She then tried one and declared: "Absolutely delicious - so good that I would happily replace my afternoon snack with it."

So, positive opinions all round. Perhaps next time I'll be sent something shoddy so I can have fun writing a critical review...

9 Bar Original from Wholebake
Oh - just for the record, the presence of something slightly healthy in the office today didn't stop us also eating some stollen and a packet of Cadbury Mini Rolls.


*Our group art and production editor would like it pointed out that he has his own blog - North downs and beyond, "thoughts and reports of the natural world from north Surrey". Can I have that payrise now please, Steve?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I still think it tasted like a tracker bar.

Anonymous said...

Here's an interesting factoid for you JD... The 9 Bar featured in the above post shares it's name with a measure of cannabis resin, called the 9 bar because it's a bar of the illegal narcotic that weighs nine ounces, a measure used - according to a book on the criminal underworld I got for Christmas - for international exportation.
I wonder if this was intentional or merely unfortunate?

Either way, when you get a free sample of Smack-a-Jack cookies, that well-known Heroine of the light snack industry, let me know...

(And incidentally, I concur with your right honourable Digital Assistant; the 9 bar (in its legal edible snack variety) does indeed taste like the Tracker bar. I have no experience thus no comment on the prohibited alternative.)

Steve Gale said...

Yes James, you can have a rise. Name your price. It has to be cleared by our publisher however. Now, what are the chances of that happening?

Anonymous said...

We recently had a snack machine installed in our building, full of chips, Snickers bars, etc. (the machine, that is, not the building). One brave soul suggested, during our weekly staff meeting, that some "healthy options" be added to the snack machine. He got his wish (the machine now includes token granola bars, in a very low compartment, near the gum and crackers and other undesirables), but since then, he's been the subject of ridicule. I feel bad for the guy. He's very nice. And the granola bars are genuinely good.

Anonymous said...

P.S.: What are "wine gums"?