If this had been the first HBAF bag of almonds I’d ever tried, I probably would have given these a pretty high review. As candies almonds go they’re pretty tasty, and fairly creative. The problem is that since I’ve tasted two other HBAF flavours of almonds, these ones seem a little pedestrian. Don’t get me wrong, these are a fine snack and I wouldn’t turn them down any time of any day. I just couldn’t call these the most creative or even the best candied almonds I’ve ever had.

The big problem I have with these almonds is all about the pretzels. HBAF has some really creative flavours for their almonds, and they pull off those creative flavours in really innovative ways. This is a fairly creative flavour, but they pulled it off in a really simple way, one might even say it’s a little boring. Instead of attempting to make their almonds taste like pretzels, they just added a bunch of mini pretzels in the bag. I feel like the folks at HBAF could have come up with a more creative solution, or even tried to go with a soft pretzel flavour instead of hard mini pretzels.

Since the pretzels are half of what you get, it also felt a little cheap. The other major problem is that pretzels are much lighter than almonds, so it took great effort to get an equal ratio of pretzels to almonds in each handful. Maybe they could have clustered the almonds and pretzel pieces?

I enjoyed eating these, but I wasn’t blown away. The flavour combination of salt and caramel is an easy match for almonds and pretzels. I was looking forward to the creative way they were going to tie the pretzels and the almonds together, and they didn’t. If you see these, buy them and enjoy them, but if you see another of the HBAF flavours you’ll probably be more impressed by the creativity.