Wayfayrer, of pre-cooked outdoor meal fame, has launched a
new range of energy bars called Energiser which are claimed to
combine great taste with the right nutritional balance for active
use.
The bars come in three flavours - Choc and Oat, Cappuccino and
Mixed Berry - and the ingredients are, wherever possible produced
using Fair Trade ingredients.
Wayfayrer says that the bars have added vitamins and minerals as
well as 'a good boost of slow-acting carbohydrates to help maintain
energy levels over prolonged periods'. Effectively they're a beefed
up flapjack.
Out of interest, we compared their make-up to our favourite energy
bars from Torq Fitness and noticed a few telling differences. The
Wayfayrer bars offer more energy per 100 grammes than the Torq 402
kCal compared to 312 for the Torq bar, but some of that's explained
by the whopping 16 grammes of fat per 100 grammes compared to 2.0
grammes per 100 grammes, which is typical of flapjack.
Then there's the sugar content, Torq uses fruit and maltodextrin
while the second largest ingredient in the Wayfayrer bars is
generally around 30g per 100g, golden syrup. That's significant
because maltodextrin is generally reckoned to be slower release than
normal sugar and syrups.
On top of that, there are consistently more vitamins and minerals
in the Torq offering than the Wayfayrer, typically around four times
the amount. In addition, although Wayfayrer claims to be the only
Fair Trade bar 'targeted at the outdoor enthusiast', the Torq Bar
uses fairly traded fruit.
To be fair to Wayfayrer, their bars are still better for you than,
say, a choccy bar and they taste a lot nicer than some of the energy
bars out there, plus at 99 pence each, they're cheaper than a lot of
their rivals and should be good as a handy hill snack despite the 16
per-cent fat content. The 49 per-cent oat content will give you some
handy slow-burn carbohydrate.
If outright performance combined with a nice flavour is your
priority though, perhaps for an adventure race or mountain
marathon-type event, we'd suggest either Torq Bars or Clif Bars as a
more performance-orientated alternative.
More at www.wayfayrer.co.uk.
Full field taste test to follow.
UPDATE: It looks like flapjack, tastes like flapjack - and not amazingly nice flapjack at that - so basically we figure it is flapkack, albeit with a Fair Trade slant and added vitamins. Not to be confused with full-on, performance-orientated energy bars, but still okay hill food if you like flapjack with some added vitamins and minerals.
