Products

We included muesli bars, granola bars and oat slices – essentially all snack bars with oats listed as the first ingredient – that are sold in multipacks in the snack aisle of major supermarkets nationally. To make the sample size manageable for our taste test, we focused on products with a chocolate flavour – the choc chip variety where available, otherwise choc drizzle or coating. Price is based on price in stores (not on special) in June 2019. We tested 11 snack bars in total. The Nature Valley Oats & Dark Chocolate snack bar is sold in the Nature Valley Crunchy Variety Pack (which also includes the varieties Canadian Maple Syrup and Oats & Honey).

Tasting

We set up a blind tasting in a shopping centre in Campbelltown, NSW, and invited members of the public to participate. Each product was given a code and its brand concealed. For each sample tasted, people decided if they disliked, liked or loved it. Participants tasted and voted on a total of 578 samples across all 11 snack bars. A minimum of 43 taste tests were completed per product.

Scores

The overall score is made up of taste 70% and nutrition 30% (based on its Health Star Rating, which we calculated from the details in the nutrition information panel and converted to a percentage). We calculated the taste score as an average of all responses, where ‘dislike’ is scaled at 25, ‘like’ at 70 and ‘love’ at 100.