I have a bias against this candy bar. There’s a reason why I have not reviewed this bar up till now, and it’s all about coconut. More particularly it’s about that chewy, sickly sweet coconut that many bars use as filling. For the most part I’m not a huge coconut fan, but when you mash it together and make it sickly sweet it just turns me off entirely. Or at least I thought it did.

In the last few years I’ve been focusing on trying to fill in the gaps on candycritic.org. When my sister in law told me that she was coming up from the USA and asked if she could bring me anything, I went through my list of treats I need to review and the Mounds bar stuck out. I asked her to bring me one (or some) and she generously obliged. So there I was facing a candy bar that I don’t remember liking, but my sense of completionism made me eat it. I took a bite and I was really surprised, it wasn’t that bad.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not my cup of tea either. I still find the coconut to be sickly sweet, and I’m still not a huge fan of coconut, but something stuck out that kind of fixed things. The trick to this bar working even a little is the dark chocolate. I don’t remember Mounds having dark chocolate in the past (maybe it wasn’t), but that really worked well with the overly sweet coconut. The slightly bitter chocolate flavour balanced out the sickly sweet just enough to make me enjoy this bar just a little bit.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t love this bar and I’m not turned around on coconut just yet. I do however have a few more of these bars to eat, and I will. If you love coconut then I think you’ll probably love this bar. It’s not that the makers of this bar were lazy or making weird choices. They designed a bar for people who love coconut, and in that respect they did a good job.