IB15: Nutrition Roundup – Tasty Treats from Clif, GU, Jelly Belly, Bonk Breaker, Carbsport & Huma

Clif Bar has upped their organic game with new flavors in the trail mix bars. Now, the collection has a whopping seven flavors: Chocolate Almond Sea Salt, Fruit & Nut, Dark Chocolate Cherry Almond, Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter, Dark Chocolate Pomegranate Raspberry,Wild Blueberry Almond and Cranberry Almond.

All are gluten free, low glycemic and have a few grams of fiber. Hungry yet? Chomp through for lots more goodies to keep you fueled…

Common ingredients in the trail mix bars include cashews, dried fruits, almonds, rice crisps, almond butter, sunflower oil, sea salt and roasted soybeans. Virtually all of it’s organic. Click to enlarge for full ingredients on the Cranberry almond flavor.

Clif’s Luna brand gets a new Chocolate Salted Caramel flavor for their protein bars.

Bonk Breaker teased us with their own Salted Caramel (which is a massively popular flavor this year!) meal bar at Sea Otter (along with a couple other new flavors that launched then. It’s now in full production and shipping. As are their chews, which are quite tasty and provide energy from organic tapioca syrup/syrup solids and organic sugar. The strawberry flavor adds a hit of caffeine from white tea.

In early August, GU hinted that they’d have bars, and they didn’t disappoint. The new GU Energy Stick is their first solid food, and it’s a very clean looking label. Ingredients are minimal and mostly (60%) organic, and both flavors are darn good.

Texture is light with a bit of crisp. The bars are thin, designed to let you easily slide just a nibble out of the package at a time and slide it quickly back into a jersey pocket.

Click to enlarge for ingredients.

When they first mentioned their multi-serving packs, the pricing seemed way too high to make any sense. Fortunately, they’ve since finalized it and the price is $15 for 15 serving for salted caramel and strawberry banana. The amino acid enhanced Roctane Sea Salt Chocolate and Blueberry Pomegranate pouches are $25. Yes, that’s as little as $1 per serving and much, much better than they originally stated. They’ll also have a specially developed Hydrapak gel flask available separately.

Their recovery drink gets a new, delicious (seriously!) Vanilla Cream flavor, available in single-serve packs (12/box for $40, or $3.33/serving) and a 15-service canister for $36 ($2.40/serving). Hint: buy the canister. It’s fortified with 1000mg of leucine, 1400mg of arginine, and 2800mg of glutamine on top of 10g whey protein isolate and 30g of carbs.

GU had a few other new items at Outdoor Demo we tasted, er, posted here.

CarbSport is a high carb sports drink (50g/serving, 14g sugar) with a decent amount of sodium (220mg) and the welcome addition of 2,000g amino acids (glutamine, leucine, isoleucine, and valine) plus calcium and magnesium. Those last two bring the total electrolyte count up to 820mg per 250 calorie serving. The lemon lime flavor also adds 20mg caffeine, and the orange is stimulant-free.

Jelly Belly has added organic jelly beans to their collection. They’re not part of the sport line with electrolytes, but they’ll still give you the sugars. The organic jelly beans come in blueberry, cherry, pear, sour cherry and coconut flavors…all mixed together in a single pouch. The organic fruit snacks come in unspecified mixed citrus and berry flavors.

Huma Chia Energy Gel is perhaps the product that most piqued my interest. I make chia pudding bowls (soak chia in GOOD coconut milk, then slice up a banana into it once thickened…freakin’ awesome meal), and I add chia to my smoothies, waffles and pancakes. I like chia, and have used Mamma Chia drinks to fuel some long rides. So, anything with chia gets a solid look from me.

Huma’s product blends solid ingredients (see image above) with natural ingredients to make eight flavors: Cafe Mocha, Blueberries, Apples & Cinnamon, Lemonade, Raspberries, Mangoes and Strawberries. Chocolate wasn’t shown because they were all out. Grab a 12-pack sampler online for about $26, or check their website for a store locator.