Veritas cherry almond & dark chocolate

I was excited to find this local (ie Midwestern) Veritas 54% cacao chocolate bar at the World Market. It is beautifully packaged in its dark vermillion paper box with cut out. The bar itself looks handcut rather than moulded. Unfortunately the taste did not match the packaging. Nothing particularly wrong with it, the almond flakes add a slightly salty taste, and the Michigan cherries are nice, but the chocolate itself is strangely bland. While it claims to be a dark chocolate bar, it has much less cacao flavour than even the Delhaize bars of the same percentage. Perhaps it's the vegetable oil, which is an unusual ingredient for higher-end chocolate bars. Overall the bar itself reminds me of Cadbury's Fruit and Nut bar, though the Veritas bar is less sweet. While my childhood in Singapore and New Zealand make Cadbury rather than Hershey my nostalgia chocolate of choice, my preference now is for something with more flavour, which this definitely did not provide.