Taste Test: Beef-Based Energy Bar

The bars look like fruit leather, taste like beef, and have a consistency similar to the inside of a Fig Newton. Omnibars are not your ordinary energy bar.

If you read the ingredients, that should come as no surprise. The main ingredient is grass-fed beef from the brand’s 42-year-old ranch in Montana. But it’s not jerky. Ingredients like sweet potatoes, prunes, almond butter, and oats give the bars a unique, chewy quality.

We taste-tested the Cranberry Rosemary bar in our office. The flavor was robust and reminiscent of Thanksgiving dinner. Definitely not the normal sweet energy bars that can become nauseatingly mundane after days on the trail, they are thankfully savory with just a tinge of sweetness.

You probably won’t want to eat only Omnibars, but they provide some welcome variety in an otherwise sweet-skewed marketplace.

Six years ago, founders Cooper and Anne Burchenal and Brent Ruby set out to create a functional food bar using beef because it “provides a level of satiety that is virtually unmatched from other food sources, while providing a complete source of protein for muscle repair and health.”

The bars are available online now. They cost $36 for a pack of 12 and come in four flavors: roasted peanut, mango curry, chipotle barbecue, and cranberry rosemary.

The Cranberry Rosemary flavor we tired contains 200 calories, 10 grams of fat, and 9 grams of protein. For outdoors activity, these bars are best used in the “meal-replacement” category, rather than for quick energy. Eat them in place of a bar, gorp, or other filling food.

As an alternative to sweet energy bars — or, even better, as a stand in for beef jerky — the Omnibars are a filling option that will not disappoint. The salty, savory taste is unique and the grass-fed beef is sure to satiate carnivorous cravings.