Right On Energy Bar Launches

Energy bars and fair trade don't usually go together, the usual association is with extruded rubber... That's all changed with the new Tradcraft GeoActive energy bars.

Carrying the Fairtrade Mark, the bars are designed for active people and contain fair trade ingredients so that as much of the money you pay goes directly to help support businesses in developing countries.

The Mango-flavoured bar, which we tried, contains golden syrup made with sugar from Malawi, mango from Burkina Faso, cashews from India and pineapple from Uganda. There's also a Cashew and Pineapple flavour bar. Both weigh in at 40 grammes and have a suggested retail price of 75 pence, so about half the cost of a sports-specific equivalent.

So what do they taste like? In four words, sickly cloying nauseously sweet. The two main ingredients in our sample bar were dried mango (31.5%) and golden syrup (29.1%) and while the bar wasn't unpleasant, we reckon you'd need to have a very sweet tooth to eat these regularly. Most specialist energy bars use maltodextrin, which is less sweet than normal sugar. We'd expect the dried fruit and rolled oats components of the bar to give a decent sustained energy release, with the one third golden syrup giving an instant kick. The bars looked like a Powerbar, but were less chewy, which was nice.

To be honest, we prefer the chocolate and raisin standard GeoBar. We wanted to like the GeoActive energy bar, but it were simply too sweet for us. They'd be fine for the odd snack and pick-you-up though and your money would be going to a good cause. You can find the bars online at www.traidcraftshop.co.uk or from selected health and wholefood shops and one world shops.