Bars in both the Cliff and granola families tend to be packed with sugar, spice, everything nice. Energy boosts delivered via peanut butter, caramel, dark chocolate or a little help from a small army of dried super fruits are the norm. But healthy snack purveyor KIND isn’t one to suffer clichés sweetly. They’ve created a paradigm changer with their savory Strong & Kind protein bars that borrow inspiration more from dinner than dessert.
With flavors like honey mustard, hickory smoked, and Thai sweet chili, when bar first meets tongue you can be forgiven if you suffer a short bout of taste bud confusion. Once the first bite shock of flavors that typically tango with poultry now married to a protein bar dissipates you’ll be wolfing down these surprisingly tasty low glycemic, low sodium, hunger beaters on the regular.
Each bar packs 10g of natural protein and the full complement of essential amino acids thanks to being packed to the gills with whole almonds, pumpkin and hemp seeds. The almonds do a great job of balancing out the heat of the roasted jalapeno but my favorite flavor by a country mile is the honey smoked bbq, a sweet heat that simply hits it out of the park.
Performance-wise they stop hunger in its tracks, offering 200 calories and change of tasty sustenance. I demoed them on a golf course on a semi-empty stomach and a bar sated my hunger for eight holes.
