The Newest Craze--Bar None

A friend of mine who was training for the Los Angeles Marathon found out about market segmentation the hard way. While he was fueling up for a run, his friend took a look at the wrapper of his energy bar--a Luna bar--and hooted.

“Apparently, Luna bars are for women,” my friend says, rolling his eyes. “I guess the female figures leaping about on the wrapper should have tipped me off. Now, I don’t think a little extra calcium or folic acid is going to kill me, but really. You’d think an energy bar would be gender inclusive.”

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In the beginning was the PowerBar, a fairly tasteless but strangely satisfying foodstuff wrapped in gold Mylar and sold in the oddest places--bicycle stores and camping shops, health food markets and college bookstores. For the first five or so years after its debut in 1987, PowerBars were the edible equivalent of Birkenstocks or Gore-Tex. The self-proclaimed “fuel for optimal performance,” 240-calorie slabs chock-full of vitamins and minerals, was favored by runners and rock climbers, backpackers and people with sub-zero mummy bags.

Then, somewhere in the mid-’90s, Americans discovered their inner campers. As cargo pants replaced pin-striped suits, as brands like Teva and Ecco went from geek to office chic, as the work world put down its briefcase in favor of a leather backpack, PowerBar begat an empire and a whole new bar culture was born.

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Now there are energy bars, breakfast bars and diet aid bars. There are brain-boosting bars, meal-replacement bars and fruity bars, and the old standard granola bar now comes in every density and flavor. There are bars just for women, bars just for men, and plenty for kids--snack bars and twisted bars, coated in nuts, laved in chocolate, shot full of cream. Weight Watchers has a line of bars, as do Ultra Slim-Fast and Kashi, but so do Tastykake and Kellogg’s Rice Krispies. Bars can be found in the cereal section, with the cookies and doughnuts and on the vitamin aisle. Energy bars occupy an entire shelf at Trader Joe’s and often require separate sections in health food stores; they can be found in drugstores, vending machines, sporting goods establishments and most 7-Elevens.

“A huge asset for these products is their portability, their packability and their portion control, all benefits consumers are demanding today as busy lifestyles are making it difficult to get to ‘real food,’ ” says Linda Gilbert, president of HealthFocus, a health trends market research and consulting firm. “Consumers perceive many of the nutrition bars as being a healthier snack than a candy bar.”

In 1999, the snack bar market did almost a billion dollars’ worth of business, which is not all that surprising considering the wide range of products it contains--breakfast, granola and energy bars. But even the snack food industry was shocked by the 1999 estimates that energy bars alone pulled in almost half a billion. Moving quickly, Kraft Foods bought the Carpenteria-based Balance Bar, which ranked second in the market, for $268 million last year. A few months later, Nestle USA acquired Berkeley’s PowerBar, the front-runner, for an estimated $375 million.

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Since the turn of the 19th century, the science fiction that deals with daily life has invariably described the fare of the future as being highly nutritious prepackaged units. Pills, perhaps, or wafers, bars sometimes or just a big glop of goo. Something to keep the systems running while we go about our highly evolved (or devolved, depending on the story line) way. In the late ‘60s, Carnation-bar-munching suburban moms fed their NASA-obsessed kids Space Food Sticks, little tubes of food matter chock-full of nutrients just like the astronauts ate. The peanut butter was not bad, as I recall, and we washed them down with Tang. Neither the bars nor the sticks fared well commercially, but clearly the concept has lingered--to create a no-frills food that breaks dining down to a chemical reaction, that allows people to control exactly what they put in their body.

Or, as one Balance Bar devotee describes it: “They taste good enough to eat, but not so good that you’d want to eat two in a row.”

She eats one a day, she says, most often in the late afternoon or to keep herself from devouring the bread basket if she’s going out for a latish dinner, which, industry analysts say, is typical of the energy/snack-bar consumer profile, as is brand loyalty. When Balance Bar discontinued her favorite flavor, she called to complain. “They told me to try the toffee almond, which is pretty good, but I still miss the mocha.”

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The similarities between snack and energy bars are completely intentional. For years, candy companies used the need for a late-afternoon boost as a cornerstone of their ad campaigns. But among aging baby boomers, twitching with concerns about calories, fat, caffeine and food allergies, a Snickers bar, even with all those peanuts, is bad dietary hoodoo. Although there is little evidence that energy bars, which provide between 250 and 300 calories, offer more kick than fruit or crackers or even candy, there is no denying their heady vitamin content. Still, Clif Bar, which is third in the energy bar market, made sure that its Luna bar came in under 200 calories, in an effort to make it more appealing to women.

And Clif Bar is by no means the first company to sub-segment. PowerBar has diversified its product line tremendously in the last five years. Many of its newer flavors--Dipped Iced Oatmeal Raisin, Lemon Crisp and Toffee--seem almost heretical to the company’s original purpose, and its Harvest Bars now include a line that is “bottom-dipped” in something resembling chocolate. Chocolate!

No longer content to boost energy, many of the newer bars also promise improved mental capacity--ginseng, guarana, green tea extract and ginkgo biloba are the new hot ingredients. Ads for the Omega bar unflinchingly promise fat loss, increased energy, improved longevity and smooth, silky skin. Can the anti-hair-loss, improved sexual potency bar be far behind?

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Meanwhile, the original PowerBar eaters--the bikers, hikers, runners and rock climbers--have moved on. At the health expo that preceded the L.A. Marathon, there were plenty of chopped-up bar bits to sample, but most of the runners were looking for gels. In palm-sized, easily opened containers, energy gels are the preferred calorie source these days.

“It’s actually too hard to eat a PowerBar while you’re running,” says my friend the marathoner. “The gels are disgusting, oh, yes, disgusting, but they’re easy. And they get the job done.”

But then, so did Soylent Green.