The RXBAR Kids line, launched in June, consists of three flavors that the average North American child will be familiar with—Berry Blast, Chocolate Chip, and Apple Cinnamon Raisin.
“We just took a look at the kid’s bar market, and it was obvious that there was a similar problem we wanted to solve with the adult line, in the sense that there wasn’t really a ‘clean’ protein bar,” Peter Rahal, co-founder and CEO of RXBAR, told FoodNavigator-USA.
By clean, he meant “high-value ingredients. We use egg whites [for protein] because of high bioavailability, and we don’t want to use any fillers or cheap binding systems.”
So what is different?
The kid’s line bars are a parallel of the original, or ‘adult,’ variety in terms of the basic egg white, cashew, and dates recipe, Rahal said.
But while the adult version has three egg whites, the children’s has only two, offering 7g of protein compared to 12g in the adult line. The dimensions are also smaller (by half an inch) and they weigh less (33g for the kid’s line compared to 52g for the adults).
It’s not that children need fewer nutrients than adults do—both FDA Dietary Guidelines and tips from the Mayo Clinic suggest nutrition for kids above infant age should be based on the same principles as nutrition for adults. Instead, Rahal said it was more about meeting customer demand and positioning the product for younger audiences, who like to snack on the adult bars anyway.
“A lot of our business is done online, so we’re really plugged in with our customers,” Rahal said. “We found a lot of them giving the regular bars to their kids, and the kids absolutely loved it. We saw this pattern of younger moms wanting to give their kids something they would eat.”
An award-winning design
Package design is also slightly different, keeping with RXBAR’s minimalist brand identity (which won Inc.’s 2017 Design Awards) with a touch of whimsy—the illustrated flavor ingredient on the bottom right corner is anthropomorphized in the kid’s line.
The cheeky ‘No B.S.’ declaration on the adults packaging has been spelled out to ‘No Bad Stuff’ in the kids variety, lest kids ask grown-ups what B.S. stands for.
“Most kids products are really ‘kid-dish,’ we didn’t want it to be too playful, we wanted to soften it up a bit but not deviate from our identity,” Rahal said. “We didn’t want to dumb it down.’