This is the outer packaging.

Apple Snaps
Imported by: Dallas International

The weirdest thing about this lunchbox biscuit for kids is that it has no overarching brand. “Apple Snaps” is the brand.

The biscuit, which also comes in Sultana Snaps and Strawberry Snaps, has a dodgy provenance. It’s made in China (by some anonymous factory) and imported and distributed in Australia by Melbourne-based Dallas International.

Dallas does actually make biscuits; they manufacture some house brands for retailers including Coles and FoodWorks. Who knows; perhaps they made the racially awkward Coles Creole Creams.

I chose Apple Snaps because it had the catchiest name of the three products in the range, but also because the idea of an apple biscuit seems more interesting and original than a sultana or strawberry one. The pack is quite cube-like and petite compared to the long rolls and rectangular packets in which other biscuits are sold, and it contains a whopping 18 individually wrapped, lunchbox-ready packets, each of which contains three Apple Snaps.

It’s also a little weird in this context that the biscuits are so proudly billed as “BAKED NOT FRIED”. Duh, all biscuits are baked. But this conceit started some years back in the savoury snack biscuit market – your Shapes, In A Biskits and so on – where the product competes head to head with potato crisps, which are indeed fried.

Here's the little pack you'd pop in your kid's lunchbox.

In a sense, any snack marketed as a portion-controlled lunchbox treat competes with those mini-packets of chips. It did strike me as a bit of a missed opportunity that Dallas does not sell a mixed pack containing all three Snaps varieties, much as you can get multi-packs of variously flavoured chips.

Dallas also markets the various Snaps to school canteens and offers a countertop point-of-sale tray so that kids can grab them like muesli bars. But since I work from home and don’t have much opportunity to eat packed lunches, I found the amount of packaging in the Apple Snaps annoying and excessive. If I had school-aged kids, I’d prefer to buy a packet of loose Apple Snaps and wrap them individually myself in cling wrap.

Also – and this is embarrassing for a grown-up to admit – I found the little packets tough to open. Perhaps it’s easier to do with nimble child-fingers than with my chorizo-like digits. But it is imperative not to manhandle them too much or you will crush the fragile biscuits inside.

From the picture on the packet, I had been assuming that the fruit would be sandwiched between two biscuit layers, much like the squashed-fly or Garibaldi biscuit. Indeed, I had rather been looking forward to an apple version of that biscuit. But while the Apple Snap is thin and has similar perforations to a Garibaldi, the texture of the Snap is much more wafer-like, with grains of sugar visible here and there. The fruit is not sandwiched but baked in unevenly in blobs. Some biscuits get a great hunk of apple; others appear almost fruitless.

Very little actual apple in evidence here.

The mouthfeel is wafer-like, too, reminding me instantly of those Neapolitan-flavoured wafers I ate as a kid. (Much like the ice cream, the chocolate ones always went first, and the strawberry ones lingered last.) Living up to the Snap part of the name, it was very crisp to the teeth. Dipping the biscuit in tea produces very little difference in taste or texture, although too prolonged a dip will make it disintegrate.

I was disappointed by the lack of an immediate apple taste; it was more like a subtle aftertaste. That said, individual biscuits do vary, and the large bits of apple I encountered tasted hard and chewy, like the jam in jammy biscuits.

The biscuits are also very small and insubstantial. Again, it’s hard for me to tell if three of them would satisfy a child for playlunch; they certainly didn’t satisfy my fellow Biscuiteer and I, who got through perhaps four of the little packets in a single tea-drinking session.

They weren’t bad biscuits; they were pleasant-tasting enough. But they weren’t very indulgent and they didn’t have nearly as much apple as promised in the name. So they fall short on both the ‘treat’ and the ‘healthful fruit’ aspects of lunchbox-packing.

Afterwards, I laboriously ripped open all the remaining little packets and decanted the biscuits into my biscuit tin, so I wouldn’t have to bother unwrapping them one at a time and could have as many Apple Snaps at once as I wanted. Perhaps it is a good thing I don’t have kids.