“Healthy snacks” and “taste good” don’t appear in the same sentence very often. It’s almost as if in order to be healthy, you have to punish yourself via tastebud — but that doesn’t always have to be the case. You could go full bore and break out the blender, mix your favorite fruits and vegetables and down a superfood smoothie. But if you’re running out the door, that’s probably not the best option. What you want is a healthy, all-natural dose of energy in bar form.
The right energy bar is a treat for your tastebuds as much as it is a midday morale booster. However, a lot of energy bars out there can taste like a glorified multivitamin, or, on the other end of the spectrum, can be packed with sugar — about as healthy as Haribo gummy bears. We like these three energy bars because they’re healthy, but they taste like they’re not.
Bumble Bar Original Peanut
Bumble Bars are sweet enough to hit your sweet tooth but aren’t overpowering. The sesame seeds, vanilla, peanuts, cinnamon and sea salt do a good job of balancing each other out. These bars are like those tiny little sesame seed candies you had as a kid, just bigger and a lot healthier.
Ingredients: organic sesame seeds, organic brown rice syrup, organic flax seeds, organic evaporated cane juice, organic peanuts, organic extract of vanilla, organic cinnamon, sea salt, natural mixed tocopherols (a natural source of Vitamin E used to protect freshness)
Perfect Bar Peanut Butter
The name of the game is organic whole foods rich in vitamins and minerals. Peanut butter is our preferred flavor, but Perfect Bar isn’t lacking in range, with various fruit and nut flavors. Though each bar has 20 superfoods packed into it for maximum nutrition, the organic honey does a solid job of hiding the off-putting taste that seems common in a lot of other nutritional energy bars.
Ingredients: peanut butter, organic honey, nonfat milk powder, organic rice protein, dried whole egg powder, organic flax seed oil, organic sunflower seed oil, organic olive oil, organic pumpkin seed oil, dried whole food powders
Epic Bar Venison Sea Salt and Pepper
If you’re a fan of jerky, look no further than Epic Bar. The sea salt and pepper venison is our favorite flavor for its spot-on jerky profile. The consistency of the Epic Bar can be a little jarring at first — think Slim Jim without the casing — but the venison is just so damn tasty, you get over it really quick.
Ingredients: grass-fed venison, lactic acid, sea salt, celery powder, cracked pepper, onion powder, garlic powder