What’s in your consideration set for energy bars?
Every week, I walk the energy/granola/power bar aisle at Whole Foods in Raleigh and make the same set of decisions. The aisle is long. The options are endless. There are 213 choices.
And yet, I always come out with about the same six brands.
RX Bar. BOBOs. Mezcla. Go Macro. Aloha. Luna.
Not because I’m brand loyal in the traditional sense. I don’t have a single favorite. What I have is a consideration set, and every brand in it has earned its spot by doing a specific job at a specific moment in my day.
What is a consideration set? It is the short list of brands a shopper actually thinks about when they’re ready to buy. Out of the dozens of energy bars on the shelf, most people mentally narrow it down to two or three they’d genuinely choose between, and those are the brands in their consideration set. The rest might as well not exist. For a CPG brand, the goal isn’t just awareness; it is getting onto that short list, because if you’re not in the consideration set, you’re not in the running.
That’s the insight brand builders often miss. In a crowded category, you don’t win by being the best bar. You win by being the right bar at the right time.
Brands need to own a moment or occasion.
Every Bar Has a Job
RX Bars are a morning bar for me. Egg whites, dates, nuts—clean label, high protein, no-nonsense. I don’t want chocolate in the morning, so the flavors I reach for from RX are the ones that feel appropriate at 8 a.m. Anything with chocolate doesn’t make my morning consideration set.
And, egg white signals breakfast.
BOBOs are also a morning bar. The lemon poppy oat variety feels more like breakfast than a snack. Oats do that. They carry a cultural association with morning that other ingredients don’t. BOBOs leans into that without saying a word about it.
Then there’s Mezcla. Their matcha with vanilla bar is something else entirely. It feels indulgent. Evening-appropriate. After dinner, rather than fuel before noon. Whether the brand intended it or not, the flavor profile, texture, and ingredient combination all point in the same direction: this is not a gym bag bar. It’s a couch bar. Indulgent.
The same is true of Luna’s Lemon Zest Bar. It is sweeter and is more after-dinner than morning coffee.
Go Macro and Aloha all fill in the gaps, each covering a slightly different mood or occasion. But the pattern holds: no single bar does every job, and I don’t expect any of them to.
Owning an Occasion Is a Real Strategy
Mid-Day Squares is the clearest example I can point to of a brand that built its entire identity around a time of day. The name is strategy. They own the afternoon energy dip, that 2 or 3 o’clock moment when you need something that isn’t a candy bar but isn’t exactly health food either.
My problem with the brand is that I forget to look in the refrigerator sections for this product (or Perfect Bar). I like them – they aren’t in a convenient place – and I understand why. But they don’t end up in my shopping cart because I forget about them.
The Mid-Day Squares brand’s personality, packaging, and positioning all reinforce the same message: this is your midday thing.
That kind of clarity is hard to achieve and easy to underestimate. Most brands in the bar category try to be all things: a workout snack, a meal replacement, a travel companion, a clean dessert.
When you try to own every moment, you end up owning none of them.
The brands that win in the long run tend to be the ones that accept a constraint. They give the consumer a clear mental file folder to put them in.
Getting Into the Set Is One Problem. Staying There Is Another
88 Acres recently worked its way into my consideration set, and I can tell you exactly why: banana bread flavor.
It’s an obvious morning snack. The flavor cue is unmistakable. Banana bread is breakfast territory, and a bar that carries that flavor profile slots neatly into a morning routine without any explanation required: new flavor, clear occasion, new customer.
And no one else has this flavor – at least that I notice.
IQ Bar is another story. I discovered them at Sprouts, not at Whole Foods, and I found one flavor I liked, a lemon variety that appealed to me. But I don’t shop at Sprouts regularly. So, IQ Bar is in my awareness, but not reliably in my consideration set.
The bar does the job. The distribution doesn’t.
This is a real problem for smaller brands that are doing everything right with the product but are fighting an uphill battle for retail placement. If you’re not where your customer shops habitually, you’re dependent on them making a special trip. Most won’t.
My wife is a good example of the other extreme.
She buys one specific flavor of Kate’s Real Bar on Amazon and nothing else. Exclusively. She’s not browsing the grocery aisle since I do the family food shopping.
She found what she wanted, knows where to get it, and buys one flavor by the case.
The brand won her completely, but she’d be invisible to them if they were only tracking in-store foot traffic at specialty retail. And it is just one SKU – Peanut Butter and Chocolate.
She learned about the brand and this SKU when I did some strategic positioning work with them about five years ago. Also, she only eats GF products, so that was another consideration.
The Cold Aisle Problem
Mid-Day Squares and brands like Perfect Bar face a different version of the same challenge. They require refrigeration.
That’s not a small thing. It means they live in a different part of the store, accessed by a different shopper in a different mindset. Even though I like both, I rarely think of them when I’m in the bar aisle because I’m not standing next to them. And frankly, I forget about them every time I walk down the energy/protein bar aisle.
That doesn’t mean they can’t build a great business, and their results so far are amazing. IQ Bars are north of $100MM according to industry reports, and Mid-Day Squares are on their way to that same level.
But I never think about buying energy bars as refrigerated. Obviously, millions of folks do.
Out of sight, really, is out of mind in this category. And one of the 4 Ps of marketing is place. And to me, that matters, given how I shop.
The consideration set is built in the aisle, and if you’re not in the aisle, you’re competing for customers’ attention, since they have to go out of their way to find you.
That’s a positioning challenge as much as a distribution one. If your product requires refrigeration, your marketing has to work harder to pre-load the desire before the shopper gets to the store, because the in-store environment won’t do it for you.
What This Means for Brand Strategy
The bar category is not going to get less crowded. Every year, more brands enter with cleaner labels, more functional ingredients, and better packaging. Competing on those dimensions alone is expensive and unreliable.
The brands that carve out a durable space in a shopper’s life are the ones that commit to a moment. Not a demographic. Not a health claim.
A moment.
Morning. Midday. Post-workout. Evening treat. Travel snack. The shopper’s life is full of these micro-occasions, and most of them are underserved or unclaimed. The question every brand in this category should be asking is: which moment do we own, and does everything we do, from flavor development to packaging to where we show up on shelf, reinforce that claim?
Three Key Takeaways
1. Occasion-first thinking is a competitive advantage. In a crowded category, the brands that last are the ones that give consumers a clear, specific reason to reach them at a particular moment. Broad positioning is a liability when the shelf is full of options.
2. Flavor is positioning. The right flavor cue can do more work than a tagline. Banana bread means morning—Matcha and vanilla mean evening indulgence. Oats mean breakfast. When your product’s ingredients signal an occasion, you don’t have to explain it.
3. Distribution and occasion have to match. A great product in the wrong store is a missed sale. If your bar is built for the morning routine, it needs to be where morning shoppers are, in the right aisle, at the right eye level, at the right retailer. Awareness without access doesn’t convert.
The bar is set high in this category, and it keeps rising. The brands that clear it aren’t the ones trying to be everything to everyone.
They’re the ones who raised their hand for one moment, one occasion, one job, and never let go.
What’s in your energy bar consideration set? You have 213 choices.
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