DARS Chocolate – Fragrant Strawberry
With brands like this I sometimes wonder if they ever consider the branding implications early on or that came much later. DARS is an interesting brand name, and it often lends itself to the association with panda for no other reason than PANDARS becoming a thing. I often hear about those clearly glamorized stories about how marketing ideas come to fruition, but it does make you wonder. Either way it was successful enough to get me thinking and considering this, and here we are now.
Once again I see the packaging is sporting the pandas to drive that wordplay of PANDARS home. I also notice that it’s indicating that it’s been 30 years. Whether or not you like something, it’s nonetheless impressive that it’s made it 30 years in the industry. Cool stuff.
As with other DARS products, this one comes in a nice cardboard tray with 12 uniform pieces. They look to be the same size and shape as well, with a clear layering going on here. There’s a thick pink center which looks to have some strawberry puree and little bits, sandwiched between two layers of white chocolate. I’m not sure if they were going for the association, but I’m reminded of the sandwiches in Japan that have strawberries and whipped cream in the center between two pieces of crust-less white bread.
The smell is very fragrant and strawberry like, and you’d be hard pressed to confuse it for something else. The flavour is also unmistakably strawberry. The white chocolate is relatively one note and sweet, but the strawberry is well served by the typical Japanese strawberry flavour profile – floral, sweet, berrylike and ever so slightly tart.
The texture of these pieces is relatively generic chocolate where it’s got a decent melt and doesn’t have any gimmicks to it. It’s just a straight up block of chocolate that has a decent melt to it and a slight creamy quality to it. I got a bit of the strawberry bits which I imagine are from the freeze dried pieces, but overall its got a nice, uniform and smooth finish to it.
I am a fan of strawberry chocolate, even if it’s the overly artificial ones. This one triggers both my nostalgia and love of fake Japanese strawberry flavour so this is an easy win for me. It certainly doesn’t hurt that everything else about it is done decently enough that it doesn’t hinder that, so I would consider getting this one again.
