A healthy idea, bar none
ON THE GO | Entrepreneur's build-your-own protein bars give customer choice
Jonathan Miller's wife, Jennifer, really hates raisins in her protein bars.
They're not really Jonathan's thing, either. He prefers dried cherries. He also wants his bar to get him going in the morning, give him sustained energy, pack a lot of fiber and offer enough protein to tide him over until lunch.
(Al Podgorski/Sun-Times)
A pre-selected variety pack offers three each of four popular bars.
Shipping is $5 for 12 bars; $10 for 24 or more bars via U.S. Postal Service.
No preservatives are used, so bars should be eaten within two months.
Order at www.elementbars.com.
But he couldn't find anything like that in stores, so he started making his own. He can have some made for you, too, via Element Bars -- custom protein bars.
Thanks to a nifty online interface, users can drag and drop their favorite ingredients into a little bundle of personalized goodness and have it shipped to their homes. You can get your whey your way.
The concept, which went live this fall, started as a series of frustrations and coincidences.
"If you go to any grocery store basically, there's probably a half aisle now of protein bars," Jonathan Miller says. "They come in every shape and variety. I would literally hold up two of the protein bars and say, Well this one is high protein, but this one is high fiber. Or this one has raisins, but I hate raisins, right? So I was literally walking around, stumbling around these aisles trying to find a bar that was right for me."
And when he had no luck, "I just started baking my own protein bars for myself," he says.
In a parallel universe, Maria Sutanto, a doctorate candidate at the University of Chicago in molecular metabolism and nutrition, was doing the same thing.
Sutanto loves cooking and running and began baking her own protein bars to meet her needs. She was working on the molecular relationship between obesity and Type 2 diabetes when she met Miller's wife, Jennifer, who was doing her fellowship in pediatric endocrinology at the school.
Last December, Jennifer introduced Sutanto to Jonathan, who already had one entrepreneurial venture under his belt in getcheapbooks.com, a college textbook price aggregator, and was studying for his MBA at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management.
At Kellogg, Miller had met Jonathan Kelley, who has a master's degree in electrical engineering and was studying new product development at Northwestern.
Sutanto brought the nutritional expertise. Kelley pitched in on operations and Web site functionality. Miller shaped it into a business. And Element Bars was born.
Its design lets you achieve your nutritional goal, whatever that might be. And it tells you how to get there if you aren't sure.
You can start with a quiz that assesses your lifestyle, though it's really just for fun.
You can build a bar that packs a wallop for your immune system. Or improves your gastrointestinal function. Or boosts your brainpower.
You begin with one of four "cores" -- oaty, for example. Drag it into a box, and you'll see the nutritional information in a chart to the side that mimics food-packaging labels. Add and remove ingredients -- nuts, fruits, sweeteners and "boosts" such as whey protein or flaxseed -- and watch the nutritional information change.
Options abound: Some ingredients are organic. A slider bar lets you adjust protein. The chewy core comes in peanut or almond butter.
You can fit 6 ounces of ingredients (generally five items) into a bar.
"If you add extra mix-ins, you're just going to get less almonds or walnuts or the rest of them," Jonathan Miller says. "But we're going to warn you, you're only going to have, you know, an ounce of almonds in your bars."
The site provides other warnings. The agave syrup, for instance, does not hang together with the oaty core. Miller recognizes, however, that not every combination can be accounted for.
But what if you discover you hate flaxseed more than Jennifer hates raisins? It's an investment: Each bar is $3, with a minimum order of 12. Miller offers a taste guarantee.
"If you make a bar and you don't like the bar, we're going to make it right for you," Miller says. "We want to make sure people are comfortable with experimenting."
For timid souls, there are some "popular bar" choices.
A partnership with TipsyCake bakery in Humboldt Park makes Element Bars' small-batch operation possible. TipsyCake bakers make the bars Wednesdays through Fridays.
The operation could grow. A custom-nutrition store in Las Vegas has expressed interest, and Jennifer Miller's favorite, the "Hungry for Health" bar, was created in conjunction with the Center for Advancement in Cancer Education.
Other developments are in the works. Sutanto is considering adding antioxidant-rich goji berries to the lineup. And just as in high school, what's popular might change: in fact, after you order, you can submit your own creation to the "popular bar" lineup for votes.
Just watch out for those raisins.
Julianne Will is a Chicago free-lance writer.