Text and photosSonya Muhlsimmer

Pool of Siloam, Blue Mountains NP

On my last day hike with a few friends we went into the local café for breakfast prior to our walk and saw that they had some hand-made muesli bars from a locally owned company called Whisk & Pin.

42 | Bushwalk February 2025

I bought a raspberry and dark chocolate one and it had a whopping 965 kJ per serve - now that is a good amount of energy per bar. Most of you know that I am all about the nutritional value in foods, so I was quite impressed with this muesli bar. I do love trying new recipes and sharing them with you all, but recently I have not had a huge amount of time to experiment in the kitchen. But seeing this muesli bar made me think about the ‘mass produced’ muesli bars in the shops, and my very good friend also did some research, in the table below. There is so much variety in the shops, I mean just look at the photo. There is LCM, Milo, Nutri Grain, K-Time, Uncle Tobys, Nice & Natural, Nature Valley, Mother Earth, Carmen’s and the list goes on.

I want to try them all just to compare taste and texture, but there are just too many. Some bars are soft, too soft to hold together in our packs for a few days. Other bars are crunchy and hard, great for the backpack. Some have high protein, low carbs, gluten free and some just have way too much sugar in them - again the list goes on. However, there is something available for everyone.

So, the point of this article is just to look at the nutritional value, energy (kJ) per 100 grams, of the list below. Muesli bars are a great snack to add to our menu on the trail, or even have them as a quick and easy breakfast with no washing up. The most important aspects of nutrition for muesli bars, well I think, are the energy, carbs and protein. If hiking for a few days, I would choose the highest energy (kJ) per 100 grams per bar, and if it has a high carbohydrate and protein count, that is a bonus.

How many bars per day would you pack? One, two or even four? Just say you carried four for a day, that would be 160 grams, on the heavier side, and over 2500 kJ, not a bad amount of energy to get you up that hill. From the list below, my choice would be the Nature Valley Crunchy Granola, then Carmen Dark chocolate bars due to the highest energy. This table is not an exhaustive list, it only just scrapes the surface really but it is enough to get you started and thinking about muesli bars. I also like the nut bars as you get all the good nutrition of nuts and they are hard and won’t break in your pack, but that in itself could be another article.

A variety of bars in the store

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Did you know that Australia’s first muesli bar was launched in 1976 by Uncle Tobys? It was called the Crunchola bar. In New Zealand the first muesli bar was the iconic Snak Log, launched in 1977, then Quaker Products, an American company launched a chewy muesli bar in the 1980s.

I can’t talk about muesli bars without talking about muesli, so here goes. Dr Max Bircher-Benner, a Swiss physician and nutritional pioneer increased the health of his patients by prescribing or feeding them a somewhat healthy recipe, as an appetiser consisting of oats, apples, condensed milk, nuts and lemon juice. Before you know it, in around 1959 the first mass-produced muesli was created and the rest, well, is history.

Go to your nearest shop and start looking at the array of muesli bars available and I will see you on the trail somewhere, we can compare our muesli bars then.