Review of the Rhythm108 chocolate bars
Introduction
I encountered Rhythm108 praline, almond, and coconut bars when I was looking for the ultimate expedition food that is both nutritious and gorgeous. Anyone doing expeditions knows how important both of these factors are: you need food that will keep you going in very rough conditions. At the same time, the food must be truly tasty – it’s extremely important for expedition morale. Imagine a week of tough weather, being soaked for days – a gorgeous snack every now and then makes it much easier to keep going.
However, it’s very hard to find food that ticks both requirements. On one hand, there is plenty of deceptively tasty snacks. However, they’re just deceptive – they taste good but will not provide the right amounts of ingredients, ultimately weakening you down. This is very important – what you need during challenging expeditions and trips in cold weather, is a lot of fat, and natural carbohydrates such as natural sugar. Artificially added sugar will be your hidden enemy – by not giving you all the proper ingredients and such, will be slowing you down.
On the other hand, it’s easy to find snacks that are amazingly nutritious, but do not taste that well. An example is dark chocolate – rich in cocoa, very nutritious, but try eating it for 3 weeks in a row…
I came across Rhythm108 bars when trying out nearly each snack in a local store, looking for the ultimate bars. In the past, I used to take a lot of plain chocolate bars, but this time, I really wanted something more effective. Once I tried Rhythm108 bars, I knew the search is over. They have all what you need for expeditions, but also for any other outdoor activities: they’re gorgeous and nutritious. On top of that, they have several other very attractive properties and features: they’re highly calorific for their weight (and thus fitting in any ultralight activities), effectively portioned, and – a very nice surprise feature – unlike many other bars – they can be easily eaten when it’s very cold.
Pros and Advantages
Let’s check all the advantages in more detail.
(1) Amazing taste. This is something that you can just check by grabbing a few of the bars. I did just that. Importantly, I did this long before I even contacted Rhythm108. When preparing for an expedition, I just bought a dozen of different bars from a local store that had the necessary nutritious properties, and tried them all. Rhythm108 bars were immediately at the top of the list in terms of the amazing taste, with no “runner-up” – it was clear to me that I’ll just stick to them as the dietary foundation in the future.
(2) Nutritious. Most of the calories in a Rhythm108 bar comes from fat. That is very important – this means the calories provided in this bar are “useful” and will give you more useful energy to run on (something that you should always avoid are snacks filled with artificial (added) sugars – these will provide hardly any useful energy and calories – avoid them at all costs). Rhythm108 is great in this respect – besides fat, the bars also come with a lot of other useful ingredients, such as fibre, proteins, salt, sodium, and some others. Protein is useful but not needed in great amounts on expeditions into the cold – exactly the amount provided in the bars. Salt and sodium are useful for keeping the right water distribution in the body (remember, you sweat a lot in the cold as well).
(3) Calorific. With around 570 calories per 100 grams of product, Rhythm108 are near the top of what you can get in food. The only food that has higher amounts of calories per grams is stuff like pure oil, but try to drink pure oil as a snack, good luck :-). This very advantageous ratio of calories to grams is important in any exploratory activities – the fewer grams that you have to carry on your back, the better.
(4) Easy to eat in the cold. This is something that I realized fully during an expedition. Many bars are very difficult to eat when it gets really cold. This is because they freeze solid, and are nearly impossible to break into pieces. This is not the case with Rhythm108. Even when -40 C and lower, it was just easy to break them into pieces and chew. I was very positively surprised by that.
(5) Effectively portioned. Unlike standard 100 gram chocolate bars, which have to be broken into pieces and kept for later (it’s just very ineffective to ear a whole 100 gram bar all at once), Rhythm108 are portioned into small 33 gram servings. That’s very effective when out in the field – you eat one bar during a short break, or maybe two when you need more energy – no messy fiddling with keeping some parts for later.
(6) Diverse. Many tastes available (coconut, orange, hazelnut, almond) make it hard to get bored of the bars.
Limitations?
Rhythm108 bars come in various tastes, and there is even a new one, with pieces of orange in it (check it out here), so they ensure plenty of diversity. However, they’re all of course sweet in taste – when on a multi-week or multi-month expedition, it’s useful to also have some salty snacks (such as dried meat), simply to have more diversity of taste.
More information
More technical information is available under the following links:
https://rhythm108.com/product-category/swiss-chocolate-bars/
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