Whether using them for breakfast, post-workout or for a convenient meal replacement, on-the-go consumers have made bars of all types a popular category for product innovation. Our food systems experts often field questions about using stabilizers and thickening systems to make an ideal nutritional, granola or cereal bar. Here are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about bar formulations:

"What gum should I use for a binding syrup?"

In product development, one main goal for a snack or meal bar is to keep all the ingredients bound together. In many bars, a general binder is needed, while in granola bars specifically, the film-forming ability of a binding system is the key to cohesiveness and stability through processing and transit. For most granola bars we recommend our ADD-HERE® proprietary line of hydrocolloids that replaces the texture and binding qualities needed in bars, but with significantly less sugar in addition to other functional benefits. Our TIC PRETESTED^® Gum Arabic FT powder is also suitable for creating binding syrups.

"How should I incorporate the gums into my product?"

Because sugar can compete with the gums for water in the mixing tank, it’s often helpful to disperse the gum in the tank and allow it to hydrate before adding sugar.

After the mixture is heated to boiling, while still hot, the binding syrup should be mixed into the dry ingredients and the bars should be allowed to cool in their desired shapes. Most of our hydrocolloid systems will work well in both chewy and crunchy granola bars. The major difference between the two is that crunchy bars will be put through a baking step, as opposed to chewy bars that must instead go through a drying step.

"I am formulating a reduced sugar granola bar. What textural properties are important, and what binding options do I have?"

Replacing sweetness can be accomplished with high-intensity sweeteners like aspartame or stevia, but what is not easy to replace is the texture, stability, gloss, stickiness and film forming attributes sugar provides and that are necessary to form and hold separate ingredients together. Dissolved sugar provides these because it can dry into a solid, and these solid properties are what bind the parts of the dry ingredients together.

In reduced sugar bars, Ingredion food system experts consider texture terminology attributes that are important to monitor and maintain. For cereal bars, these include but are not limited to the following: