The Quest to Build a Perfect Protein Bar
In the past seventy-five years in America, the nutritional bar has gone from niche to mainstream. In the fifties, Bob Hoffman, of York, Pennsylvania, known as “the father of weightlifting,” and an early manufacturer of barbells, hawked a product called Hi-Proteen Honey Fudge. Made from soybean flour and peanut butter, it was touted as offering “strength and endurance,” without “commercial” sugar—“not candy, just a good health, energy and body building food.”
In 1969, Pillsbury attempted to capitalize on Americans’ excitement about the moon landing by releasing Space Food Sticks, a grocery-store adaptation of a product developed for astronauts: compact tubes made with corn syrup, vegetable oil, and sodium caseinate, a derivative of cow’s milk, meant to be consumed through a helmet port. By the turn of the century, the form wouldn’t seem so futuristic, or novel. As fitness evolved from pastime to life style, the PowerBar, created in 1986, became a staple even for amateur athletes, and a Clif Bar seemed as crucial for a hike as boots.
Today, the question of how to eat with extreme efficiency extends beyond space travel and sports. Soylent, the meal-replacement shake, first appealed to coders who subject themselves to punishing hours at a keyboard. It’s not unusual to see someone unwrap a protein bar for a one-handed lunch in any workplace. Though most Americans are already meeting or exceeding their recommended daily amount of protein, recent surveys show that a growing number are trying to eat even more of it. Protein is venerated by adherents of keto and paleo diets, and by the plant-based crowd and extreme carnivores alike. It’s essential to building muscle mass, making it the coveted macronutrient for gym rats, perimenopausal women, and people using GLP-1 drugs to lose weight. In the past few years, I’ve watched the word move front and center on a preposterous range of packaged goods, from obvious items like cottage cheese to unlikelier specimens such as breakfast cereal and lemonade.
Increasing one’s protein intake requires an annoying amount of foresight, a willingness to experience short-term displeasure, or both. Many protein-dense foods, such as meat and eggs, are expensive, and adding protein powder (usually made from whey or legumes) to any food is an almost surefire way to make it taste worse. There’s an appealing transparency to the protein bar, which purports to be little more than a shape. “It’s a perfect vehicle, because it doesn’t have an identity to begin with,” Andrew Lipstein, a novelist who is perhaps the most devoted protein-bar consumer I know, observed recently.
“Before I’ve even wiped the sleep from my eyes, there’s usually a Quest bar in my mouth,” he said. It’s a habit that emerged about a decade ago, during a solitary breakup-inspired stint in Oregon—years before he published three books, had three children, and started working full time in fintech. “It’s very funny to imagine that I thought I needed to shave off minutes in my day back then,” he said. “I was living in a place where I knew no one, I didn’t have kids or a romantic partner, I didn’t even have a job—and I was, like, I need to cut out ten minutes.”
Most of the protein bars on the market are indistinguishable, ranging in texture from paste-like to crumbly, in flavors that suggest playful indulgences such as doughnuts or mint-chocolate-chip ice cream. One distinctive offering is Rxbar, whose spartan ingredient lists read like recipes for upscale bird feed—“3 Egg Whites, 6 Almonds, 5 Cashews, 2 Dates”—and are proudly printed on the front of the wrappers. Rxbar was débuted in 2013, in Chicago, by a pair of childhood friends named Peter Rahal and Jared Smith, after Rahal, a CrossFitter whose family was in the juice-concentrate business, noticed a lack of nutritional bars that were both high in protein and made of whole foods.
After Rahal and Smith developed a recipe in Rahal’s parents’ kitchen—the resulting product, gummy and nutty, tastes like something that might have been served as dessert on a commune in the seventies—they went around convincing CrossFit studios to carry them. In 2016, President Obama was ridiculed after the Times reported that he consumed exactly seven salted almonds each evening, yet the Rxbar, similarly austere, was soaring in popularity.
Rahal and Smith sold the product to Kellogg’s in 2017, for six hundred million dollars. By the time their noncompete agreement expired, a few years ago, Rahal had experienced a shift in his “nutritional philosophy,” he told me. With a new partner, Zach Ranen, he set out to make a bar with the best possible proportion of “macros”—a bar whose caloric efficiency might inspire the heights of human accomplishment. Last fall, they unveiled their creation: a pale, sticky rectangle that clocked in at twenty-eight grams of protein (more than double that of Rxbar), a hundred and fifty calories, and zero grams of sugar. It came wrapped in gold foil, printed with the brand’s name in a large serif font that evokes early Mac ads. They called it David—as in Michelangelo’s.
One afternoon in February, I visited the David offices, on the eleventh floor of a building in Manhattan’s flower district. Rahal, who has icy blue eyes, dark, curly hair, and a compact, muscular build, sat behind a pair of monitors at a long desk that he shares with several of his employees. In conversation, he is direct and intense, cordial but too methodical to make small talk. “I was a consumer of bars—they’re convenient, they’re value-dense, they have a ton of utility,” he said, telling his origin story. “Utility is a value of mine.”
From the desk, we could see directly into the David kitchen-laboratory, a small, glassed-in room presided over by a cardboard cutout of the Michelangelo sculpture (its genitals covered with a cutout of a David bar) and by a twenty-six-year-old food scientist named Gracyn Levenson, who joined the company after working on research and development for Taco Bell retail products, among others, at Kraft Heinz. Now she spends her days painstakingly adjusting the formula of what she and Rahal call the bar’s systems: its combinations of proteins (egg white, collagen, derivatives of milk and whey), fats, binding agents, and flavorings.
Among Levenson’s tasks is figuring out how the taste of each bar changes during its shelf life, and even from bite to bite. In the case of David’s newest flavor, cinnamon roll, she said, “the first thing we wanted to hit in your mouth was cinnamon, then, in the crescendo, the yeasty, darker notes, and then finish with sweet icing.” Levenson had noticed that the icing notes were fading after a few weeks, “so that’s the one that we’ve been pushing up.”
The first bite of a David bar tends to leave a thin film on the roof of my mouth. But I reliably go back for another when a big hit of salt lands on the back of my tongue, then another, goaded by the crunch of crispy orbs dispersed throughout the bar. It’s far from my favorite way to consume calories, yet it leaves me with a perverse sense of accomplishment and control.
The idea that more protein optimizes fitness in anyone besides serious athletes remains up for debate. Christopher Gardner, a nutrition researcher and a professor at Stanford, has argued that most Americans are eating enough protein to maintain a healthy life style, without supplements. He emphasizes in his scholarship that the human body has no way of storing excess protein, as it does for fat and carbohydrates. “The muscleheads who are having a lot of meat and regular meals and a protein shake and a protein bar are turning all that into carbs and fats at the end of the day,” he said on a podcast in 2023.
David Allison, the dean of the public-health school at Indiana University-Bloomington and an obesity researcher who, along with Peter Attia, has advised Rahal, frames it differently. “If I said, ‘You make a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, that’s enough’—well, it depends where you want to live, it depends what your goals are,” he told me. “You can say, ‘Walk every day so you don’t get diabetes, do this so you don’t have a heart attack.’ But I don’t want to just not have a heart attack. I want to be as vital and energetic as I can for the rest of my life.”
