Dive Brief:
- Clif Bar will appeal to athletes' cravings for savory rather than sweet workout snacks with a new line of packaged energy gels.
- New savory flavors include pizza and sweet potato fries.
- Clif Bar follows suit after Kind Snacks launched its own line of savory snack bars in flavors like honey-smoked barbecue, honey mustard, hickory, Thai chili, and roasted jalapeno last summer.
Dive Insight:
According to The Wall Street Journal, the energy bars and gels industry is doing about $1.4 billion in annual sales. Most of these energy snacks rely on sweet flavors, like chocolate and strawberry, but many athletes do not share appetites for sweets. So far, savory-flavored snacks that actually taste good have been more difficult to produce, and smaller, regional companies are now some of the first to enter into this new trend of using nontraditional ingredients for energy snacks.