Farmbake, Chocolate Chip Fudge
Be honest with me, cookies, is this “fudge” in the room with us now?
Farmbake, if you’re not familiar, is Arnott’s rusticly boujie brand, the glamping of biscuit marketing. The implication is that these perfectly circular biscuits didn’t come off an assembly line, but were delicately molded by a grandmother’s hands. They’re the up-market version of Arnott’s own Premier Chocolate Chip Cookies, but the segment is starting to feel a bit polluted.
Enjoy the blend of chocolate chunks, fudge, and CRUNCH with Arnott’s Farmbake Chocolate Chip Fudge. Baked golden and to perfection, you will enjoy every bite of these scrumptious cookies.
I’m reticent to retread the grounds of my Gaiety review, but these are again an eerily similar variant of the classic Woolies bag of cheap choc chip cookies. Let’s not get confused; these are mass-produced, but they do as good a job as you can under those restraints. You can’t make gooey, fudgey cookies shelf-stable at a reasonable price point, and so these instead go the route of the crunchy, almost powdery profile of the el cheapo’s. You can tell you’re eating garbage, but it’s still weirdly warming. I love it. To reference the strikingly similar Premier’s again:
However, that’s not to say these are bad, because quite frankly, those bottom-shelf bags absolutely slap. They’re not going to compete with homemade, but they have a certain nostalgia that keeps me coming back every now and then.
But that just leaves me with one outstanding question: why do these specific fudge cookies exist, between the Premier’s and the Farmhouse brand’s already existing Chocolate Chip flavour? I can’t detect any fudge in these, and the ingredients contain chocolate chips but make no mention of fudge. I’d be very curious to A/B test the two, but I suspect it would be difficult to pick either out of the line up. They feel supurfluous, but you can’t blame the child product for it’s parent’s company’s choices. In our quest for the best, we must judge the biscuit on its own merits.
Market segmentation decisions aside, I like these, chiefly for nostalgia purposes. My main thought while reviewing these was that, despite all the window dressing, you just can’t replicate home-made in a factory setting, and I’m fine with that – because these gave me the inspiration to get up and bake my own cookies, which, yes, thank you for asking, were delicious. What more can you ask of a product than to inspire betterment of yourself?