Mars Pods Honeycomb Bites

Pods area crunchy biscuit product that's unique to Australia and New Zealand. They are manfactured by Mars Snackfoods, and in 2004 were released to the Australian public in the base flavours of Snickers and Mars. Twix soon followed, and since then we've seen various flavours come and go, including Cherry Bite, Mint Slice, Toffee Time, and their new release, Honeycomb Bite.

I've known about these since January, but my Mars rep made me swear not to share them with you until they were released to the public. (Check out the little story on the back of the package - apparently they beat me to the review.)

Constructed from a cup-shaped wafer bottom, the Pods are then filled with chocolate, caramel or flavoured cream, and topped with chocolate. The biscuits themselves are small, a touch over 2.5cm (one inch) wide and long, and about 1cm at the thickest point. Pods are crunchy, tasty, and very more-some, but also incredibly sweet.

Through the transport process, many Pods tend to lose the lip of wafer edge, and the top chocolate layer often ends up scuffed and dull. Beyond the cosmetic damage, the biscuits are whole. When opened, the bag smells absolutely delicious. There's a huge note of toasted honey and not much else.

The crunch is a big selling point of Pods - the bag states they are 'ingeniously crunchy', after all - and I've never experienced a bag of Pods not arriving fresh and crunch. On biting the biscuit, there's of course the lovely texture of the wafer base, and then the smooth coolness of the chocolatey entre. Despite what the bag says about the centre containing a 'dollop of honeycomb-flavoured cream', the centre is most definitely solid and stuff, a little like a fondant, but when combined in the chew with the wafer and the chocolate, it may as well be as solid as the chocolate for all the difference it would make. And unlike the picture on the front, it's not a definite layer of chocolate over over the honeycomb filling - there's a neat little squiggle that shows where the filling and the topping overlapped in application. And of course, there's never as much filling as there is in the picture!


Chocolate is a strong flavour here, and it's only towards the end that the honeycomb flavour emerges. It's a lot like the honeycomb pieces in Hokey Pokey ice cream - a little malty, and there are lots of warm honey notes in there too.

I LOVE these, and it shouldn't really be any surprise that the bag of these didn't even last the time it took me to write this review.