RedCon1 MRE Bar: Low-Dairy Protein Bar Stuns the Masses

The RedCon1 MRE Bar is finally here, and it’s everything the market wanted. Just nobody realized it yet.

Take.

My.

Money.

At this point, it’s not even fair for the rest of the sports nutrition and greater “functional foods” industries. RedCon1 is endlessly smashing the competition to pieces, and nobody’s even complaining about it. It’s just happening.

It’s one thing for a company to make and sell products that people ask for. That’s how you get supplements like the Total War pre workout or the Ration whey protein powder.

But you’re on a whole new level when you’re making products that customers didn’t even know they wanted until they saw them. And that’s exactly where Aaron Singerman and his team at RedCon1 are now at.

Making MRE true to its name

When the MRE meal replacement powder came out, everyone ogled at the label – here we have an MRP that uses whole food sources and is extremely low on dairy, opting for protein sources such as beef, defatted salmon, chicken, egg, and some vegetarian sources.

Nobody was betting against it, but we weren’t really sure how it’d work out until we tasted it. Well you know how that went… it went gangbusters! And the new flavors keep upping the game even more.

But there was always one thing “wrong” with MRE: it’s not truly ready to eat! In order to get those carbs and proteins, you still have to mix it and shake it.

Not anymore. The MRE Bar is here.

You can now safely abandon your shaker cup, MRE fans. MRE Bar has everything we love about the original powder, but even more – it’s in a delicious bar, and it’s got some insane-tasting coating to boot!

We’ve seen the protein bar market take a turn for the better lately: the days of that fake fiber nonsense are coming to an end, and with it go the days of brick hard bars. But while everyone else was looking left to the next weird binding carb or sugar alcohol for their protein bar, RedCon1 looked to the right and used what they already had – real food in a meal replacement!

This story’s gotten long, but this is really only the beginning. Sign up for coupon alerts and RedCon1 news from PricePlow below, and then let’s roll into the oats and everything else inside:

The MRE Bar Ingredients

Good news for all you MRE fans – the main protein/carb ingredients themselves are generally the same, but MRE Bar has a far higher ratio of protein to carbs, so you’re going to see things in a slightly different (and dare we say better?) order:

Finally, in all their full glory, we see the RedCon1 MRE Bar Ingredients and Nutrition Facts. And to some, the macros may actually look better than the powder’s!

Next is a more detailed breakdown. But if you already get the idea, you can click here to skip to the flavors and our market analysis on.

• The Protein Blend

  That’s right, the protein blend actually comes first in MRE Bar, as opposed to it coming after the carbs in MRE. This is due to 20g total protein vs. 29g carbs, which shifts things around a bit.

  Inside, you’ll get the same exact dairy-free protein blend that’s in MRE:

  • Beef Protein Isolate
  • 

    A look behind the wrapper’s curtain reveals a longer list of ingredients than MRE, as you’ll need to get the bar put together!

    Salmon Protein

  • Chicken Protein
  • Egg Albumin
  • Brown Rice Protein
  • Pea Protein

  Salmon protein?!

  New to MRE? Don’t worry, your bars won’t smell like fish. This is defatted salmon, so it has the quality ‘real-food’ proteins without the fishy omega smells.

  For the record we do love salmon and recommend everyone eat more fish… we just don’t want it in our sweet protein or meal replacement bars!

  But what about the beef protein quality?!

  The beef protein isolate is the same story as in RedCon1’s original MRE – true beef protein. Here’s what they told us in our MRE blog post:

  “It’s a real beef isolate, beef off the bone.”

  — RedCon1

  The reason some people are concerned is because some of those “beef proteins” are really the hydrolyzed collagen proteins from areas such as the tendons. Those collagen proteins have a vastly inferior amino acid profile.^[1,2]

  Not a problem here, Singerman’s squad is giving us the real beef here.

  But with all these crazy protein sources, we’d still love to see a complete amino acid profile performed on this stuff!

• The Carbohydrates

  This is actually broken into two parts on the label:

  1. Gluten-free rolled oats

     Oats are the featured taste and dominate much of the consistency of MRE, and the same will be said here – especially after seeing the images initially leaked by Aaron Singerman.

     

     This image was leaked by the visionary Aaron Singerman

     Hopefully you’re cool with us not explaining oats to you. Moving on:

  2. “Carbohydrate Blend”

     This area’s where the carb fun is at. You start with some dehydrated yam, add in dehydrated sweet potato (do you know the difference?), then it’s pulled together with pea starch, coconut water powder, various flavors (such as dehydrated blueberries for the blueberry cobbler bar), maltodextrin, and dextrose… all assisted by MCT oil, cellulose gum, and more spices and sweeteners that depend on the flavor.

  Long story short? You have a diverse bundle of carbohydrates, dominated by real food like oats, yams, and sweet potatoes, and very little ‘junk’.

• The “protein bar stuff”

  

  All MRE Bars are the same size. These are the initial three launched, but we can only imagine more are on the way.

  Here’s where things deviate from the powder, and you need to make sure you’re still cool to eat these.

  By “protein bar stuff”, we mean the various thickening, texture, and binding agents, as well as the coating (which does introduce a dash of whey).

  A full list from the blueberry cobbler flavor:

  Soy protein isolate, vegetable oils (palm, palm kernel, soybean), sugar, vegetable glycerin, sorbitol, water, maltitol, whey protein (from coating), peanuts, brown rice flower, chicory root flower, natural flavors, sunflower lecithin, corn flour, whey, mono and diglycerides, soy lecithin, beta-carotene, vitamin A palmitate, sucralose, potassium sorbate, corn starch, fruit and vegetable extracts, and almond.

  Can you handle it? Probably!

  So as you can see, the bar does now contain trivial amounts of whey and soy inside, which may turn off a few MRE fans (not us). If you’re horrendously lactose intolerant or allergic to soy, this may knock you out of the running, but we don’t foresee this really stopping anyone who’s only mildly sensitive.

  In fact, Aaron Singerman chimed in with this comment when we asked about it:

  Sadly, they have to use milligrams of whey in the chocolate coating. There was no way around it. Very very little but we have to mention it on the label to be compliant.

  No one, and I mean no one, should have a bad reaction to eating these bars.

  — Aaron Singerman, RedCon1 CEO

  Putting a solid bar together is a difficult science, no doubt, but the main idea is that the primary protein and carb sources are all legit, which should satisfy nearly everyone. The coating is worth it (and for you entrepreneurial folks out there, there’s a free business idea in this very post).

MRE Bar Macros

The MRE Bar Nutrition Facts. Same as above on the box, but Mike needed more images to fill the page since CJ won’t let him open one up ahead of our review.

With more fat and fewer carbs per gram of protein than MRE, some of us may actually find this a better option:

• Calories: 260
• Total Fat: 9g
  • Saturated Fat: 5g
  • Monounsaturated Fat: 3g
  • Polyunsaturated Fat: 1g
  • Trans Fat: 0g
• Cholesterol: 40mg (13%)
• Total Carbohydrate: 29g
  • Dietary Fiber: 3g
  • Sugar: 6g (5g added)
• Protein: 20g

Flavors

At initial launch in March 2018, MRE Bar has three flavors, two of them familiar to MRE fans:

• Blueberry Cobbler
• Banana Nut Bread
• Oatmeal Chocolate Chip

The MRE powder already has blueberry cobbler and banana nut bread, while the new bar entry is oatmeal chocolate chip… because every bar needs a chocolate chip variety!

We can only assume more are on the way after these sell out.

Before we give our thoughts, its best to hear it from the team first:

A word from RedCon1

Eric Hart, the beastly VP and chief formulator at RedCon1, decided to steal Aaron Singerman’s spotlight for the day, telling us this:

For the bar, when you get it, you will notice it has an oatmeal core, different from anything on the market. When you eat it, feels like you at a breakfast bar, not a protein bar that you keep tasting again and again throughout the day. It really is enjoyable to eat. Break a bar open and look at the middle, it’s quite unique.

You have the same protein and carb blend as the powder, just all wrapped up in a baked bar. We went with 20 grams because a bar with 30 grams of protein, when you scale up the carb content to match the powder, the bar would have been massive.

— Eric Hart, RedCon1 VP

Now let’s consider the market and business end:

RedCon1 gets it.

In our introduction, we mentioned how Aaron Singerman and the squad at RedCon1 are delivering products that nobody even realized they wanted. We have to explore this further.

Here’s just a few ways that MRE (the powder) is unique:

RedCon1 set a blazing path through the supplement industry in 2017, here’s an interview with Aaron Singerman discussing the banner year.

1. It’s dairy-free, but not vegetarian-dominant
2. It’s high in carbs, but uses real food from yams and oats (and barely any maltodextrin)
3. Despite the above “all-natural” routes, it uses two artificial sweeteners to top the flavor game.

What?! Why go out of the way to do all that “natural” stuff and then throw in artificial sweetener?!

Allow us to explain.

Singerman sees the market (and the future) crystal clear

The third bullet point is where Singerman flexes his marketing muscle. He knows something you don’t know. But don’t feel bad, because everyone else missed it too:

What other brands think:

Why has practically nobody made a serious weight gainer or meal replacement with the above three bullet points in mind? Because other brands think the market is like this:

This is how most brands saw the meal replacement market before RedCon1. Those who want “real food” and “dairy-free” don’t want fake sweeteners, right?! WRONG. They’re not even framing the ‘question’ properly! Keep reading.

What the market is:

But that’s not how our market works, thinks, or acts. Those bubbles aren’t even framed properly, but that’s how we’re generally sold to. RedCon1 sidesteps that line of thinking.

Behold the truth:

Here’s how Aaron Singerman views the meal replacement market. All inclusive!

See what happened? MRE hits EVERYONE we care about in this market!

This is a product that is practically all-inclusive, except for the Prius-driving sucralose haters, as CJ would say on our YouTube channel. And the stevia sect isn’t exactly RedCon1’s core customer crew anyway.

Have you checked our new RedCon1 news page to stay up to date on their latest promotions?

So here’s the facts: bros in the know and bodybuilders alike are sick of too much crap like maltodextrin and fraudulent fake “fibers”. They love real carbs, oats, brown rice, and all.

They’re also not afraid of sucralose. After eating chicken breast and brown rice for a decade, they want some flavor with their convenience shake. So RedCon1 is also unafraid to throw in a bit of artificial sweetener to make the flavor a slam dunk.

Aaron Singerman gets it. So RedCon1 gets it.

Which is why MRE wins.

And that’s why MRE Bars will win too.

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