What Organic Energy Bars Actually Are

That second part is the bit nobody prints on the front of the pack, so we may as well start there.

We've been making organic bars in Austin since 2011, which means we've read a truly unreasonable number of ingredient labels. It's exactly as thrilling as it sounds. What it taught us is that the seal answers one good question very well, and most people are asking it three or four more it was never built to answer.

So here's the honest version, from a company that pays for the certification and would rather you knew what it buys. The bar has to be right at mile four, not just right on paper.

What the USDA seal actually covers

To carry the seal, a product has to be certified by an agent accredited by the USDA, and both the farm and the facility get inspected. Three things have to be true. The crops were grown without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers. Nothing was made with genetic engineering. And somebody documented the whole chain, from the field to the wrapper.

That last one is what makes it a certification rather than a nice word on a label. Somebody with a clipboard checked.

What it doesn't do is describe the food inside. A bar can be 95% organic and still be mostly organic cane syrup, and it can carry the seal completely legitimately. Organic says nothing about calories, protein, fiber, or how long the ingredient list runs. It's a farming standard doing a farming standard's job.

The three organic tiers, and why they are not the same

This is where labels get slippery, because there are three different organic claims and they don't mean the same thing.

100% Organic. Every ingredient certified organic, apart from added water and salt. If the product is processed, even the processing aids have to be organic. Rare in a multi-ingredient food, mostly because things like added vitamins usually aren't certified.

Organic. At least 95% of ingredients by weight, excluding water and salt. This tier carries the USDA seal, and most organic bars you pick up sit here. The remaining 5% is not a free pass either, since it has to come off an approved national list.

Made with organic ingredients. At least 70%. This one cannot carry the USDA seal anywhere on the package, front or side. It can name up to three organic ingredients, and it's allowed to do that on the front.

So a pack saying "made with organic oats" and a pack carrying the seal are a full tier apart, and both are being straight with you. The seal is the difference, and the seal is all or nothing. Either a product qualifies and can show it, or it doesn't and cannot show it anywhere.

What to check once you have looked past the seal

The seal gets you to a shortlist. Four things get you the rest of the way, and every one of them is on the back of the pack.

Start with how long the list is. Not the marketing copy, the actual list. If it runs past a dozen items and you can't say half of them out loud, that tells you more about what you're holding than the front does.

Then find the sweetener. Whole fruit shows up under its own name, dates and figs and raisins. Syrups show up as syrups, whatever they were made from. Ingredients run by weight, so the first three are most of what you're eating.

Check where the protein came from while you're back there. In a plant-based bar it usually arrives as nuts, seeds, or a protein isolate. All three are fine and they're not the same thing, and the front of the pack rarely tells you which one you got.

After that it's whatever you personally need. Gluten free, vegan, soy free and non-GMO are separate claims with separate standards behind them, and a bar can hold one without holding the others.

The certifications on our wrappers, and what each one covers

We ask a lot of you in this post, so it seems only fair to open our own wrapper. Here's what we carry and what each one promises.

And one that's a recipe decision rather than a certification. We keep the ingredient lists simple, in every flavour and every line. Nothing goes in that does not need to be there.

We also make everything ourselves in Austin. No farming it out, no co-packing, which means the people who wrote this are the same ones running the mixer and arguing about whether the next batch needs more cacao.

The rest of the range lives on the energy bars collection page.

Frequently asked questions