Better Breakfast Day 2022

On Monday, September 26th, it will be Better Breakfast Day. I didn't know that until recently. Today I want to share a breakfast option that I tried out a few months ago. I've eaten a few brands of breakfast cookies or biscuits in the past. The qualities we look for here on The Chocolate Cult vary greatly as do the nutritional values for the products. The Olyra Dark Chocolate Breakfast Biscuits were a brand and product I've never heard of before until I was offered a coupon for a free box of them via the Social Nature program. All I had to do was share my honest experiences with the product and post an image on Instagram (which I did back in June 2022). Today I'm writing in depth about those breakfast biscuits for you to check out. I got these at my local Kroger, which is a huge grocery store chain in the USA using that coupon; no other form of compensation was received for my posting about today.

As an ancient historian, I was intrigued by this idea that these biscuits are made from grains that the ancient Greeks would have used. You can tell the stone ground quality of them from the texture (a bit rough) and the flavor (earthy and a bit nutty even though no nuts are involved). The four grains listed on the box are oats, spelt, barley, and lupine (which I believe was a flower and not what we think of as a grain crop today). Of these, barley is the most common ingredient that would have been used by the Greeks of antiquity. The biscuits were much harder than I was expecting and the one I bit into immediately crumbled into pieces you can see in the photo. That means that this product would not be great for eating on the go, you'd want a plate or bowl to catch all the pieces even though they were fairly large.

Let's look at a unbroken biscuit. On both sides is an image and I was trying to figure out what it was. What do you think it looks like? In the photo I can see it more clearly and I think it may be the goddess Demeter who oversaw agriculture particularly grain. Do you see her to the right holding a sheaf of grain in one hand? If that is correct, then why is the image for the biscuit itself this eros figure (almost cupid-like because he looks so young)? The connection between Eros and Demeter is only of distant family, I'm unclear to why the branding would be this way.

I've written about the cookie part of the biscuit, so let's look at the filling which should be dark chocolate. It does indeed include dark chocolate, cocoa butter, natural cocoa mass, and cocoa powder according the ingredients list. It also has a lot of sweeteners and palm oil, the sweetener may explain the odd aftertaste in my mouth that lingered far too long. The chocolate is certainly dark with a hint of bitter to it that I love, but that sweetest was off putting. For a moment I thought it might be a sour yogurt but no such ingredients are on the list.

This is an okay breakfast biscuit or cookie, but it isn't great. Certainly not as good as other brands I've had in terms of taste. It is on par with several brands in terms of nutritional values at 180 calories per biscuit made up of more carbs (a good split of fiber and added sugars) than fats and protein. As for being plant based, I haven't had a single breakfast cookie that couldn't say that.