Dear Nabisco and Parent Company Mondelez International,

We here at the Mayo Clinic have been furthering medical science and treating patients for the past 150 years. Our progress through research and education are unparalleled, and our hospital and medical specialties have been consistently lauded and ranked amongst the best healthcare organizations by third party publications. Which is why we are proposing a residency for the scientist who came up with the “Chewy Chips Ahoy! Ice Cream Creations Root Beer Float.” Now, this is a strange request, you may be saying to yourself. Please, first let us tell you what we think of the cookie.

We think it’s wonderful. When the seal is torn off the light blue packaging, a root beer breeze wafts from the tray. It serves as a time machine to the first time in our childhood we had a root beer (or at least the first time we had a root beer-flavored Jelly Belly). The nostalgia extends to the actual taste too, as it resembles something that of a softer, sweeter root beer, such as Mug. There is even a little tingle in the throat as you have obviously harnessed some sort of earthy extract to poke at our uvulas.

The star is the root beer flavor, but the white-colored, vanilla-tasting chips do a great job of being cool and mild, balancing the overall flavor out as well as completing the experience that is “root beer float.” And what look like regular chocolate chips are actually root beer-flavored chips. They add a nice dimension to the texture and burst of root beer taste when each fake chocolate chip pocket is breached. The flavors and texture are probably more balanced and consistent than an actual root beer float, which can be just mouthfuls of either only ice cream or only soda and overall a wet affair.

The cookie texture you have down—you guys are obviously pros and have been perfecting the chewiness for going on thirty years now since the introduction of Chewy Chips Ahoy! cookies. We know it’s a trick, but they’re as soft as warm cookies straight out of the oven. It’s insane. There are a few qualms we have, such as testing our resolve with making such an easy-to-eat cookie. (Question: Why was the doctor jittery and restless? Answer: She didn’t have any patience/patients!). But also, while the root beer flavor is exquisite, it doesn’t come with the carbonation or the mouth feel of a real root beer, and our brains keep telling us this is not real. It makes the experience a bit chemically, but we think that is out of your hands, Nabisco.

The distribution of chips is also a bit uneven. While no cookie in the bag was bad (yes we ate the whole bag—with some tea in the break room), some cookies are chock full of the sweet morsels and the experience between an average one and an above average one is discernible. Lastly, get rid of the packaging. The bright, electric blue doesn’t make us hungry for cookies. Stick with earth tones please. (Question: Why was the doctor jittery and restless? Answer: She just worked a double shift and a guy died!)

Whoever came up with this idea and executed it was an outside thinker. He or she looked to the future while being informed by the past and that kind of thing is exactly what we want on Team Healthcare, so we would love to offer him or her a position on our team.

“But cookies aren’t saving lives,” you say. Well to that we respond, did you think a ragtag team of oil drillers couldn’t save our planet from an oncoming asteroid? Stop being so closed-minded, because I don’t want to miss a thang. “It wasn’t even one person,” you say, “It was a team of marketing people and a food scientist.” Nabisco, we are the Mayo Clinic. We can do things. Have you ever seen that movie the Fly? We can smush your team of marketers and one food scientist into a single mutant monstrosity that collects one paycheck from us. Don’t worry about it.

Just send everyone involved with this project over. And while you’re at it, send over a box of Triscuits. Send ten. Or we’ll release the airborne genital warts. “Airborne genital warts?” you ask. You know what? You’re going down, Nabisco. Consider this a warning shot. The Mayo Clinic now officially backs cookie mogul the Girl Scouts. (Question: Why was the doctor jittery and restless? Answer: She just stole some Ritalin to self-medicate but hasn’t taken it yet.)

Cordially yours,

The Mayo Clinic

Rochester, Minnesota

(Nutrition Facts – 140 calories, 60 calories from fat, 6 grams of fat, 3.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 95 milligrams of sodium, 20 milligrams of potassium, 20 grams of carbohydrates, 0 grams of fiber, 12 grams of sugar, and less than 1 gram of protein.)

Item: Nabisco Chewy Chips Ahoy! Root Beer Float Ice Cream Creations
Purchased Price: $2.99 (on sale)
Size: 9.5 oz.
Purchased at: D’Agostinos
Rating: 9 out of 10
Pros: Chewy. Root beer-y. Easy to eat—less wet, sticky than actual root beer float. Chips give good balance to cookie. Goes wonderfully with tea or coffee.
Cons: Ate a whole bag in two sittings. (Liar) One sitting. Some cookies are better than others. Could be chemically off putting to some. /p>

Opportunity cost can be a bitch, and as you get older, it only gets worse. Especially when it comes to food. Sure; There may have been days during our youth in which we burned bright with a metabolism that allowed us to have our cake and eat it too (along with a large pizza, a bag of Fritos, and a Dr Pepper Big Gulp) but the further we get from our college days, the more those extra calories force us to make decisions when it comes to things like chocolate chip cookies and brownies.

We can’t have both. Decisions, decisions…Don’t get me wrong, it truly tears at the inner child to choose between such scrumptious things, but sometimes it’s better to banish one than risk an abrupt sugar crash or the onset of Type 2 Diabetes. Nevertheless, does one go with the buttery and chewy texture of the cookie, or the fudgy, oh-God-yes crunchy edges of a chocolate brownie?

Apparently the folks at Nabisco are not immune to feeling the effects born from the tyranny of opportunity cost, because their new Chewy Chips Ahoy! Brownie Filled Chocolate Chip cookies promise all the best qualities of both cookies and brownies. To quote the monochrome dudes from the Guinness commercials: BRILLIANT!

Opening the box, you’ll find yourself greeted by that signature Chewy Chips Ahoy! aroma. You know the one I mean. The kind of unmistakable boxed chocolate chip cookie smell that tells you, “it’s not homemade, but if I’d have to throw an exclamation point to any boxed chocolate chip cookie, it’d be this one.” It’s also an aroma that is completely unlike the stale aroma of regular Chips Ahoy! cookies, which if you ask me just smell like a synthesis of the stuff in the back of your office fridge.

The cookies have plenty of mini chocolate chips and are definitely chewy, but I wouldn’t call them brownie filled. Nay, they’re more like brownie stuffed, because aside from taking up most of the interior volume of the cookie, the brownie flavor definitely dominates each complete bite.

It’s closer to a mellow cocoa flavor than over-the-top fudgy decadence though, and while each bite is moist there’s also a graininess that puts these brownies more into the tender and cake-like department than melt-in-your-mouth chewy. If you’re the kind of person who has a habit of eating uncooked Duncan Hines brownie mix batter, you’ll find the tastes oddly reconcilable. I find that mostly a good thing, but I do miss the chance to indulge in the crunchy edge that makes brownie fanatics and frequent fliers, like me, impulsively buy brownie edge pans 30,000 feet in the air from a SkyMall catalogue.

I also found myself mourning the fudgy flavor typical of brownies, and wished there was an extra oomph of cocoa butter to round out the flavor and decrease the slightly artificial vibe. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, the ingredients show no sign of cocoa butter – neither in the chocolate chips of the cookie, nor in the brownie.

Speaking of that cookie, it’s kind of an afterthought. Despite having so many chocolate chips and smelling like your standard Chewy Chips Ahoy! cookie, the expected sweet burst of chocolate just doesn’t come through.

I appreciate the effort from Chips Ahoy! to make an acceptable escape clause to the tyranny of dessert opportunity cost decisions, and when measured up against the spectrum of Chips Ahoy! innovations, this is definitely up there with the most creative. It’s a good packaged cookie, but that’s about all.

It’s not quite fudgy or chocolaty enough to really convince you it’s a brownie (even a packaged brownie like the one Fiber One makes) and not quite as classic tasting as a chocolate chip cookie, so I can’t guarantee it’ll satisfy your craving for either.

(Nutrition Facts – 1 cookie – 80 calories, 30 calories from fat, 3.5 grams of fat, 2.0 grams of saturated fat, 1 grams of monounsaturated fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 30 milligrams of sodium, 65 milligrams of potassium, 12 grams of carbohydrates, 0 grams of fiber, 5 grams of sugar, less than 1 grams of protein.)

Other Brownie Filled Chewy Chips Ahoy! reviews:
Junk Food Guy

Item: Nabisco Brownie Filled Chewy Chips Ahoy!
Purchased Price: $1.98
Size: 9.5 oz
Purchased at: Walmart
Rating: 5 out of 10
Pros: Inside tastes like brownie batter. Moist and chewy cookie. Lots of chocolatey chips per cookie. Saying to opportunity cost, “Screw you I can have a brownie too.”
Cons: Brownie lacks richness. A bit grainy and cake-like. More cocoa flavored than fudgy, and not sweet enough. Fake chocolate chips. Chocolate chip cookie flavor was overwhelmed by brownie.

A cookie is one of those foods that really should be review proof, right?

It’s a sweet mound of dough and sugar, sometimes with something tasty contained within. People who don’t enjoy sweets aren’t going to eat them, and people who do are almost automatically going to like them. Yeah, you can get some outliers like shortbread cookies or Fig Newtons that some people hate, but by and large, there’s no way to mess up a cookie…EXCEPT by messing with the formula.

Sometimes successful companies who have plateaued on expansion with their existing lines will try dreaming up new variations of a product they’ve already mastered. Occasionally this works out really well. Frequently it…doesn’t. But it’s why we’re here today to discuss Chips Ahoy!’s latest offering, a dual attempt to increase market share and to make my spellchecker commit suicide.

The premise behind Sweet ‘n Salty is that they’re part of the “chewy” sub-line of Chips Ahoy!, but in addition to chocolate chips, they also contain salted caramel chunks. Since caramel is inherently sweet, it seems like more of a 2-1 ratio, but I guess “Sweet ‘n Salty ‘n Sweet” isn’t as marketable.

As you’d expect, the package is strongly modeled on Chips Ahoy’s “house style,” where you exchange some originality for instant recognition. If you’ve ever seen an EC horror comic, you know what I mean — any issue of Tales from the Crypt, the Haunt of Fear, etc. had a large box in the upper third with the book’s title, a small rectangle on the far left with an eye-catching noun like “Terror” or “Horror,” and three circles showing the trio of hosts (the Crypt Keeper, the Vault Keeper, the Old Witch). The individual cover images would vary, obviously, but you always recognize an EC cover or parody immediately.

As the “chewy” variety of Chips Ahoy!, this package is primarily red, with the standard logo and lettering and background. However, the image depicts a cookie with both chips and caramel chunks and supplements this with the ubiquitous “New!” tag in the upper left.  Overly creative? No. Recognizable? Quite.

To my non-cookie-expert mind, it seems like the key to success here lies in achieving the right balance. Too salty and it’ll turn away people who came for a cookie, not a cracker.  Too sweet and you risk rendering the salt unnoticeable/irrelevant. I’m happy to report that Chips Ahoy! seems to have found a pretty good balance, albeit with just a little less salt than I might have liked.

The cookies are the same size and consistency as any other Chips Ahoy! cookie you’ve ever had, and yes, they are indeed chewy, almost oozing rather than crumbling into your mouth.  The chocolate is sweet, the chips are plentiful, and the caramel definitely makes its presence felt, though not overbearingly so. As a caramel fiend, I actually could have used just a bit more, but overall it’s a good proportion. 

And yes, you will taste some salt, though it takes some time to hit; and as I mentioned before, remains fairly subtle. You might get the impression that these are chocolate chip-caramel cookies that some factory worker just accidentally dumped some salt into, and while that doesn’t make them taste bad by any stretch, I could see some people (like me) wishing for more.

Still, it’s hard to fault Chips Ahoy! too much for that. A pleasing taste, soft texture, and sweet smell combine, Voltron-style, to form a pretty darn good cookie, at least by prepackaged grocery store standards. I do think they could have just not bothered with the salt, but maybe that’s one of the things that attracts people and moves product in a way that plain caramel wouldn’t have. And that’s why I’m not one of the cookie mavens.

(Nutrition Facts – 2 cookies – 140 calories, 60 calories from fat, 6 grams of fat, 3.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 grams of polyunsaturated fat, 2 grams of monounsaturated fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 95 milligrams of sodium, 25 milligrams of potassium, 20 grams of total carbohydrates, 0 grams of dietary fiber, 12 grams of sugars, and less than 1 gram of protein.)

Other Chewy Chips Ahoy! Sweet ‘n Salty Salted Caramel Chunk:
Junk Food Guy

Item: Chewy Chips Ahoy! Sweet ‘n Salty Salted Caramel Chunk
Purchased Price: $3.79
Size: 9.5 ounces
Purchased at: Acme
Rating: 8 out of 10
Pros: Strong brand marketing. Seeking the sweet/salty nirvana. Enjoyable smell.  Plentiful chips and caramel. Stay chewy, my friends.
Cons: “Subtle salt” not just a good band name. Certain people (wives) might find them overly chewy. Could get lost among similar-looking Chips Ahoy! Chewy varieties. Suicidal spellcheck (also a good band name).