Buy a bar | Feed a child | We eat together
Net carbs: 21 g Added sugars: 11 g! ( the entire bar is 40 G, so over ¼ of THIS is added sugar.)
Overall rating: 🤮🍯🍫
Flavor
Look at this photoshoot by Blake Little where he drenched nude models in pure honey. That’s what THIS BAR tastes like.
These are incomprehensibly sweet. Earlier I noted that this 40g bar has 11g of added sugar in it. But there are 13g of sugar total, so the full reality is even worse.
A lot of energy/protein bars fall into the category I’ve named “Health Candy.” Every marketer with basic cognitive function knows that people instinctively believe everything in bar form is healthy.
Smart businesses capitalize on that on strike a balance between clean-looking packaging and loads of sugar to get the suckers hooked.
But since this is simply a product to move wealth from our economy into whatever third-world country they’ve chosen, health doesn’t matter. They just need a flavor that is addictive enough to keep people forking over their hard-earned fiat dollars.
Sweetness overwhelms all other flavors here. I couldn’t taste any pistachio in the Blueberry Pistachio bar. The dark chocolate & cherry only provides a hint of its titular flavors.
Everything drowns in a sea of honey.
Packaging appeal
I’ve said it before. In the food industry, transparency sells. Literally and metaphorically.
Making a window in your packaging where people can see the food is always a good move. Customers deserve to really see what they’re buying.
Many bars don’t want you to really see the product because many bars look entirely unappetising. THIS looks pretty good, though. The seed and fruit mix has a pleasing texture from the balance of uniformity and randomness nature excels in creating.
There is a design inconsistency on the packaging, though. The blueberries and pistachios on one bar have a posterized pop-art feel to them, while the cherries on the other are realistically rendered.
And where’s the chocolate? Why show both ingredients on one package and not on the other. Perhaps it’s because you’re scared of customers realizing that you’re really just selling candy.
Ingredient quality
The intro to this ingredient list is amazing. They have a great collection of nuts, seeds, and fruit in every product. It’s almost exactly what I eat in my yogurt every morning.
But right after the chicory root, we find the sweeteners, oils, emulsifiers, and preservatives that reveal THIS BAR’s distressing reality.
It’s hard to be more processed and artificial than THIS BAR. This is the snack equivalent of vegans who brag about their healthy diet while also smoking marlboro cigarettes and drinking gin & tonics.
After removing the bars from the wrapper, you can see the sugary oil residue they leave behind. It looks like nothing anybody should eat.
Lecithins and tocopherols are not great for you. Furthermore, the presence of these binders and preservatives indicate that THIS BAR’s recipe is inherently flawed. If you need to resort to lab-processed ingredients, then you have a problem.
Company practices
Earlier in this piece, I wrote very cynically about THIS BAR’s philanthropic efforts. I both stand by my comments and acknowledge that this company appears to genuinely help people.
In the IMPACT section of their website, they illustrate a very simple plan to help malnourished children. Nothing fancy going on here, folks. They just send packets of enriched peanut butter that “take a child from severely malnourished to completely healthy” in 8 weeks. What a beautifully simple way to solve a horrible problem for these kids.
I’m glad they don’t send THIS BARs to the children because that would take them from malnourished to pre-diabetic in the same time span.
One has to wonder what the real mission is, though. If they wanted specifically to send the peanut packs abroad, they could accomplish this as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The fact they are incorporated as an LLC tells me that profiting from candy bar sales is a higher priority.
Philosophically, I don’t object to people making money by helping others. Especially in such a dramatic fashion.
But if you make money selling junk food, and use a portion of your profits to help people in another country, is that worth the health problems they cause customers?
Excessive sugar is a plague that threatens global well-being. We’ve spread our culture of shitty processed foods across the world. The more we allow it to continue, the worse off the whole planet will be.
What good is it to heal these malnourished kids if they’ll be doomed to the diet of processed oversugared quasi-food that we’ve forced upon so many developing countries?
Snackability
Honestly, the Dark Chocolate & Cherry THIS BAR was so sweet I couldn’t finish it. I do have a low sugar tolerance due to my general abstinence but as I’ve mentioned, over ¼ of this product is sugar.
While the size and shape make this theoretically quite snackable, the excessive sweetness makes THIS a burdensome culinary experience.
Overall, THIS BAR gets a rating of 🤮🍯🍫
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