Greens On The Go: The Right Mix of Protein, Calories and Flavor with Laura Harris

When you are just starting to take the "healthy route," walking down the grocery aisle can be overwhelming. Protein bars, energy bars, diet bars, meal-replacement bars, gendered bars, bars for your brain, you name it! You may be wondering if there are any potential benefits to eating these health bars, and the good news is, there definitely are. Laura Harris, founder and CEO of Greens Gone Wild, introduced a new product to the market. An energy bar that incorporates spinach and various greens into one nutritional bite. We invited her on the show today to talk more about the product. --- Listen to the podcast here: Greens On The Go: The Right Mix of Protein, Calories and Flavor with Laura Harris Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. In case it’s not obvious from my other episodes or if this is the first one you’re listening to, I live in Colorado and Colorado is known for being a pretty active and health-conscious state. I think I’ve seen on multiple occasions, maybe not the latest numbers, that we have the lowest obesity rate in the country and that’s something I’m pretty proud of. Now, my guest today, Laura Harris, recently introduced a new product to the market, a product called Greens Gone Wild, which is an energy bar that incorporates spinach as well as other greens for various health outcomes and I will let Laura describe it herself instead of being in the business of trying to translate someone’s business from their conversations and their website. --- Laura, welcome to the program. Thank you so much. I’m happy to be here. How’s your day been today? Day has been pretty good. Weirdly enough, yesterday, I went storm chasing, something I haven’t done in a little while. Very cool. Where was the storm? Near the town --- between the towns of La Junta and Lamar in southeast Colorado, which is a part of the state that a lot of people don’t think about or go to that often. That’s so cool. I actually submitted a picture of inch-and-a-half-sized hail to the Twitter account of the National Weather Service so I did my part in weather verification too. That’s awesome. Have you been able to submit other photos previously? Yeah, yeah. All you have to do is @ whichever National Weather Service office’s zone you’re in so if you get hail at your house, @NWSBoulder is our local office and you can --- usually I like to put like the hailstone next to an object of known size, like a dime, a quarter, something like that. That makes sense too because then you really get to see, well, just the magnitude of the size of hail. Yeah. And the bonus, of course, is that if you’re at your home and then eventually need an insurance claim verified for getting a new roof, that’s your proof right there. That’s a good call. Now, did you have any spinach packed protein bars with you while you were storm chasing? So, unfortunately, I did not. I made the mistake of relying on gas station snacks, which meant Chex Mix, and, yeah, I could have been quite a bit healthier. But that’s a great segue for us to talk about these spinach packed protein bars that you introduced to the market. Was it last year or earlier this year? It was actually the summer of 2019, so June 1st was our first sales day and we did the Colorado Fresh Market circuit plus Sloan's Lake and it was so exciting, so busy, and we had a lot of great people loving what we were doing. Explain to us a little bit about these spinach packed protein bars that are sweeping across grocery stores in Colorado now. I love that. At Greens Gone Wild, we created spinach packed protein bars. They’re vegan, gluten-free, non-GMO, soy-free with no refined or added sugars. You’ll get a full serving of spinach in every single shelf-stable bar. They taste amazing. They’re super chewy. They don’t get stuck in your teeth. The flavor is outstanding. And we don’t use any fillers, preservatives, no junk, and no natural flavors, which is very important to me. And so you talk about these artificial ingredients in general, and do most protein bars, because I don’t know if people really pay attention, have these artificial ingredients in it? Most of the bars, like I think of the Clif Bars and all the other stuff that people will pick up for their hikes. A lot of them have fillers, they’ll have refined sugars, and with Greens Gone Wild, we keep it really simple. When you look at the back of our bar, you’re going to have about 10 ingredients or less. It won’t be something that you get ingredient exhaustion because the print is so fine because there’s so many things that they have to talk about. And added sugars are another big addition to a lot of bars. And to the other bars out on the market that have greens, they’ll typically use kale or spirulina or they’ll put wheatgrass in, all of which are wonderful, but once you put them into a bar, you really run the risk of having a super bitter taste and because that’s just not something that our American palate loves, we like a bit of sweet, you’ve got to add so much fake stuff to get it to taste palatable. So a lot of these bars, in order to introduce the fiber and all these other desired outcomes, to offset the taste, they introduced these added sugars. Now, I’m proud to show you that I’m drinking water right now, I’ve had struggles before drinking soda, which is high-fructose corn syrup, probably one of the worst things for you, and so when people switch to not consuming, and I’m going to use refined sugars as the example because that’s the one that I heard about and studied the most, what is the difference in outcome for someone, say, going on a hike or going on --- my thing is bike riding? Yeah. So when you have a refined sugar, your body processes it so quickly and, again, I will also say I don’t have a nutrition background, there’s no science right behind this, but it is a lot of the basic stuff that you can find on the web and then also too just when you consume it yourself, a majority of people who eat a refined sugar are going to get a spike in energy but it does not last. You’re going to crash shortly thereafter. Whereas if you eat something like a bowl of blueberries, for instance, you’re going to get energy, it won’t spike, but it processes as it’s supposed to because it’s just the natural sugar from the blueberry itself. With our bars, that’s also what we wanted to make sure we did was one simple sugar that’s going to come from the ingredient, which would be dates or blueberries, depending on if it’s the date --- sorry, the blueberry coconut bar or if it’s dates and bananas in our peanut butter banana bar, and because my business partner, who was so fantastic with recipes, he is the chef and the creator, we knew that adding fiber, fats, and protein also adds to that natural sugar and really allows you to just have a 10-mile bike ride that you’re energized for the entire way, not just your on mile 2 or 3 and you’re like, “Man, oh, I’m crashing right now,” or if you were hiking, you get to hike a lot longer without having to take a break, unless it’s just for water or to use the restroom. I’ve actually seen people put together this profile of energy intake where a simple processed sugar, whatever, is going to have a quick spike and then quick crash, whereas a natural sugar, say, I was talking about eating oranges or apples or something like that, especially if you mix it with some other more complex carbohydrates, is more likely to have a longer, slower burn, it doesn’t spike you quite as high but it lasts a lot longer. Absolutely, and that’s what we want. If we were to segue quick into why I started this business, it’s I’ve worked in the service industry for such a long time, we don’t get breaks. I relied heavily on bars and you could tell the difference in certain bars where it was closer to natural ingredients, I could have a few bites and I’m sustained for a while, or if it’s one that’s packed with more sugar and I have a few bites and then, all of a sudden, it’s bing and I’m ready to go but then within 30 minutes to an hour, I’m crashed again and then then hanger sets in because I potentially haven’t had a break yet for the shift. And that’s important for us. So, I decided that I wanted to make a bar that also contained a lot of greens, because I love spinach, it’s super healthy for you. It might not be the only green that we use, we’ve got some fun flavors that we are considering making in a couple of years, putting those together, spinach, bars, we rely heavily on bars, so many Americans do, just people around the world, and then natural sugars, gosh, what a great product that the industry is lacking and that I know others like me would be so happy to have for their bike rides, for hiking, when serving, the busy mom, running around with her kids. Our bars are super kid friendly. Really for anyone.Share on X Yeah, that makes sense. And so another key aspect of the idea behind the bar is it’s something you can take on the go because I think a lot of people, like when I make kale, for example, I mean, I cut it up, I cut up garlic, I bring the oil, everything like that, it’s very much an at-home cooking for a while, by a while, I mean 10, 15 minutes, but you know what I mean, it’s not a portable thing, you’re on a backpacking trip or something, you’re not going to bring out the skillet and chop up ingredients and stuff like that. And so this portability was just another key component to why you designed the product the way you did? It was, yes. And it’s funny that you mentioned pulling the skillet out of the backpack. So, we recently applied for a certain show where you can win --- not win but have someone invest a lot of money in you and we had to do a little video and we did like an