Make a High Impact with Your Nutrition Bars

With an estimated $500 million in sales for 1999, the fast growing nutrition bar market has created a fiercely competitive environment with over 70 brands and hundreds of nutrient and flavor variations. These bars cover a myriad function claims with ingredients as benign as rolled oats and natural fruit to complex formulations containing amino acids, vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals. Meeting this competitive challenge for the new millennium will require constant improvements to current products as well as the introduction of flavor systems that actually make these bars taste good. The paradox of performance versus taste has left many of the consumers jumping from one brand to another because the taste is so bad. Manufacturers or prospective retailers of bars have to realize that taste is as important as the levels of nutraceuticals added to satisfy performance claims.

Flavors can be added anywhere in the bar:

Enrobed Coating: Yogurt or Dairy Flavors to enhance a yogurt-based coating. Chocolate or Chocolate Enhancers, Peanut Flavors and other Brown Flavors such as Caramel, Graham or Butter Toffee can all be added to augment the coating and cover the addition of ingredients such as Vitamins A and C, E, or various phytochemicals.

Filling: Fruit Flavors or Enhancers to optimize the flavor profile of fruit purees and help cover the taste of the nutrients used. Specially blended Vanilla Flavors that work wonders in providing a sweeter profile as well as other Brown Flavors to mask some of the bitterness.

Coating: Oat and Rice Bran Toners can be added to cereal grains to preserve flavor integrity during processing. Masking agents designed to cover the tastes of amino acids or proteins, soy and whey, can alleviate the sawdust taste of many of these nutrients. Specific masking agents can be used to add lubricity to the matrix.

No matter what type flavors are used, attention must be given to the ingredients used. The amounts of ingredients can determine the texture and the taste. Flavors can do only so much to help a badly formulated bar. Under normal circumstances, flavors will not interact to cause a problem with other ingredients, but concern arises when the pH is not optimized to prevent degradation from occurring. Minerals and some food colors can be affected by a low pH. Too high a pH can cause a graying of the colors. Maintaining a good color helps with the appeal ability of the bar. Remember some of the natural ingredients used may contain contaminants, such as trace minerals, that can react with other ingredients. The type of fat used or the addition of new nutrients such as omega-3-fatty acids raise an alert for possible rancidity and oxidation. Flavors soluble in these oils will also "turn" when the oils degrade and thus not provide the original pristine flavor profile.

No matter what the challenge is, our chemists can advise you on technology to help you formulate a compliant, good-tasting bar. By employing both compounded and reaction technologies, we can design a flavor system and a physical form that are specific to the needs of your product.