By Andrew Garcilazo, co-founder
Our first product here at Hiker's Gold has officially launched. It's an energy bar made from a blend of nuts, dates, chickpeas, cocoa powder, and cacao nibs.
It's pretty good, and I hope you give it a try, but first, a little background on how it came to be.
In previous blogs I've written about why I picked an energy bar as our first product. Now I'll explain how that turned into what we have today.
First, there are plenty of other energy bars out there — countless bars, in fact. So the big thing I wanted was to be different. I wanted our bar to stand out.
How do we stand out? In my view, our bar needed to be unique on ingredients and it needed to be unique in terms of branding. The branding part was easy. We're Hiker's Gold, we're targeting outdoors consumers as an outdoors food product company. A few other energy bars target that same niche, but the vast majority do not.
Standing out on ingredients was a little more difficult to decide, but I had an idea. Enter chickpeas (also known as garbanzo beans). You see them in a lot of different products these days, including chickpea pasta and chickpea crackers, the list goes on. But until Hiker's Gold came along, I hadn't seen chickpeas in any food bars. As a result, I saw chickpeas as an opportunity to help us stand out.
In tandem with that, I wanted our bars to be "cleaner" or healthier than other bars. That meant no added sugar. Fewer ingredients. Plenty of fiber. Many bars also focus on healthier ingredients, but almost as many don't seem to care. I want us to be squarely in the better-for-you category.
After a going through a few different prototypes with our manufacturer, we finally had the recipe nailed. And just like that, our Nut & Chickpea Bars were born.
Our first flavor is called Cocoa Oasis, with a design on our packaging to match. I saw both the flavor and the design as another opportunity to set us apart from our competitors, and I think the final product does just that.
Why cocoa or chocolate as the first flavor? It's pretty simple. Along with peanut butter, chocolate is one of the top selling protein/energy bar flavors on the market. Going with either of the two flavors would increase our odds of success, at least that was my thinking.
If you haven't already, give our bars a try. When you do, be sure to let me know what you think!
You can email me any questions or comments at andrew@hikersgold.com or follow me on Instagram (@andrewgarcilazo).
