Have you ever wondered how we make the best all natural high calorie meal bars that money can buy? In a sentence, we use the highest quality ingredients available, and do very little to process them. For the rest of the details, stick around!
There are five steps to making Range meal bars, and each step doesn’t stray far from something your Grandma would approve of in her kitchen. The first step is mixing the “dry” ingredients. While each flavor is slightly different, the dry mix for each is based on gluten free whole grain oats, organic brown rice cereal, organic flax meal, and organic chia seeds. These all natural and high quality ingredients form a strong nutritional foundation by providing complex carbohydrates, omega 3’s, saturated fats, fiber, and vitamins and minerals.
The second step in making our high calorie meal bars is mixing the “wet” ingredients. In the case of Alpine Start this is organic peanut butter, organic honey, and organic cocoa powder. For Fresh Tracks, this is almond butter, and molasses. Both mixes are formulated to be a balance of simple carbs for quick burning energy, and healthy fats for all-day fuel. Note that no Range bar flavor uses brown rice syrup as a primary sweetener.
The third step in producing these all natural meal bars is mixing the wet and dry ingredients. Thankfully a commercial grade mixer does most of the heavy lifting for this step. The resulting dough gets very thick as it rapidly transitions to the firm but moist texture that customers expect from a Range meal bar.
The fourth step is forming dough into balls, and then pressing those balls into bars. Once again we borrow the muscle of a machine to work with the dough, this time in the form of a 2-ton mechanical press that forces the dough balls into a custom plastic mould. Without the power of this press, making the tastiest meal bars money can buy would be almost impossible.
The fifth and final step in making our all natural meal bars, is packaging. We use a custom shaped funnel to force bars into packages. Then we use yet another machine, called a horizontal band sealer to inject nitrogen and seal the packages. This machine also stamps a LOT number and best by date on the packages.
And that’s it! The bars are ready to tag along with you on your next adventure, whether that’s an ultralight meal on the PCT, or as an easy high calorie food for bulking up in the weight room.