Tribe Protein Flapjack

Tribe Protein Flapjack is a tasty protein boost that's made with all-natural ingredients and is easy to carry on the bike. Its slightly flaky composition makes it best suited to eating when off the bike rather than on it, though. It's also rather expensive.

This compact, pocket-friendly protein bar packs a decent kick for its size. It comes in two different flavours, caramel and raspberry. Each bar consists of three layers: a flapjack base, with a caramel or raspberry date layer above this, topped off by peanuts.

As with all of Tribe's products, not only is the Protein Flapjack vegan, it's HFSS (High in Fat, Salt and Sugar) compliant – this basically means it's scored a high enough nutrition rating to pass the new government legislation. And for every one you buy, Tribe will donate 1p to the Tribe Freedom Foundation: a charity established by the company to fight modern slavery and human trafficking. So there you go, not many protein bars can boast that kind of ethical prowess, it's fair to say.

Inside each bar you'll find an array of all-natural ingredients, including date paste, gluten-free oats, peanuts, soya crispies, and natural caramel flavouring (you can find the full list here).

Nutritionally, the headlines stats are: energy 823KJ, carbs 19g, fats 9g (saturated fat is just 1g), with protein at 7g. It's not going to give you a massive mid-ride boost, then, compared with similar products, but then again Tribe's 50g Protein Flapjack is so small and light you won't notice it on you, and you could probably take several of them along for the ride.

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No matter whether you go for the caramel or raspberry offering – both actually taste very similar – you'll likely be pretty pleased with the flavour. It's not game-changing like the Veloforte bars I tried previously, but the taste is subtle and they certainly aren't sickly in the slightest.

There's a good degree of moisture to the bar, but my only gripe with it is that it's quite crumbly, so as you're taking it out of the packet it does tend to fall apart a bit too easily sometimes. You probably wouldn't want to try eating one while you ride, as you'd risk losing half of it.

Off the bike, it's no issue, of course; I usually eat drier, more solid foods like dried apricots while I ride, anyway.

Value

The Tribe Protein Flapjack comes in boxes of 12 and costs £22. That's about £1.83 per bar, which certainly isn't cheap. In fact, given these are only 50g per bar I'd say that's definitely on the expensive side.

For comparison, the Torq Explore Flapjacks I tried a few months ago worked out at £1.67 per bar when bought in bulk. Each bar is 65g, making it even cheaper per gram. That said, Tribe's Protein Flapjack offers more than twice the amount of protein, which makes sense given it's labelled as a protein bar, whereas the Torq bar isn't.

Veloforte's Mocha Protein Bar costs £2.42 at its cheapest (when bought as a box of 24). Interestingly, the Mocha Protein Bar offers about 14.7g per 100g of protein versus the Tribe Protein Flapjack's 14g per 100g, so they're fairly matched, but when you look at protein per £, Tribe's bar is slightly behind Veloforte's at £3.66 per 100g versus £3.46 per 100g.

Conclusion

Though Tribe's Protein Flapjack is quite a pricey option, it's a very compact and convenient size, and tastes good, the only downside being it's not one you can really eat while you ride. It's also good to know that you're supporting a very worthwhile charity when you spend money with Tribe.

Verdict

Decent performance and fairly tasty, though it's expensive and you can't eat it while you ride