After 2 years of no LIVE Natural Products Expo we from Smart Fox Nutrition were back on the tracks to look at for new trends, fading trends and new cool stuff. We did not see a whole lot of them, but several companies on the show exhibited with savory bars. That always triggers us… Savory bars: Quite a challenge and many fail to get enough sales to keep going. In three posts we will walk you through the savory bar market:
- History by example. We look into several brands that have or have had savory bars in their assortment and what their current position is.
- Current Samples of savory bars taken from the Natural Products Expo West 2022
- Do’s en don’ts for savory bars (if you still dare)
TIG bars by Rxbar
Seen at Expo West in 2019…
Gone in 2020
Introduced by Insurgent Brands (Rxbar)
Taste & Texture not in balance, too hard, falling apart when biting. Made the impression that it was pushed on the market whilst still in development.
Kind savoury bars
Seen at Expo West in 2017.
Well balanced, good combination of nuts and nicely flavored, not overdone…
Not on show in 2018. Sales had moved to online only at that time. Gone in 2019.
Consumers had not picked it up.
EPIC
Jerky bars made by Epic
We picked these up in 2018 for the first time at Nat Prod Expo West and they are still going.
If you like Jerky and/or meat you might like these bars. Their are more brands doing similar products, e.g. Tanka.
Powerbar
As seen on Expo West in 2018.
Jerky concept gone wrong…
Cereal Bars with pieces of real meat/jerky. Probably seen as the answer to the upcoming Jerky Meat trend at the time. Must have been a big project to have meat certification in a cereal bar production company.
Nice try, but… no!
Kashi
Cereal bars with Basil and Olives…
this flavour combination fits well with crackers maybe, so why not keep it there?
Bars looked funny, smelled funny, and taste was not really savoury but had a sweet touch still.
That didn’t work…
Mediterra
The above examples show that Savory bars are a difficult nut to crack. The Jerky bars are successful but that might be because the products were already known in a different format. Still, a bar is a bar… Personally we believe Kind bars might have pulled off their savory bars from the market too early. They did not get a chance to develop on the market and people might have needed more time to adjust to it. Anyway, the route to a successful savory bar is far from easy. Can it be done? Well, we will try to go into this in the third post.
First will have a look at the latest savory bars from Natural Products Expo West and see what we think of those. Look out for the second post on this…
