Cereal bars

Alternate Protocol 3 Determination of P-Glucan in Cereal Bars E3.5.7... 

Hallund J, Bugel S, Tholstrup T, Ferrari M, Talbot D, Hall WL, Reimann M, Williams CM, Wiinberg N. 2006. Soya isoflavone-enriched cereal bars affect markers of endothelial function in postmenopausal women. Br J Nutr 95 1120-1126. 

Cereal bar FUm wrap Paper/LDPE/alumiuium foil... 

Fig. 5.12 A few examples of modern food products that were manufactured using agglomeration technologies, (a.l-a.4) Cereals and cereal bars (courtesy Kellog Co., Battle Creek, Ml, USA) ...

Successful functional product innovations dealt with other food sources have been mainly launched targeting the markets for nonalcoholic beverages fortified with the vitamins or other functional ingredients, breakfast cereals, cholesterol-lowering spreads, confectionery, biscuits, cereal, cereal bars, soft drinks, probiotic and prebiotic dairy products. 

Obviously, jelly beans are not a health food, but they aren t as bad for your teeth as you might think. In fact, potato chips are worse. The sugar in jelly beans is soluble, so your saliva washes it away, but the complex carbohydrates in chips are insoluble — they stick to your teeth, providing food for acid-producing bacteria. Researchers in New Zealand found that the effects on the teeth of jelly beans are no worse than the effects of cereal bars or health bars made with dried fruit. 

There are cases where a suitable process control can even increase the overall performance of the process, especially in production processes working with bottlenecks. Such is the case of a factory that makes cereal bars where the product labels indicate a fiber content of 4 %. Given that the machines at the factory are not well controlled, the addition of fiber has a variability of 2 %. In fact, the machines, programmed to add 4 % fiber, deliver a product that has between 2 and 6 % fiber. Therefore, to ensure that the products comply with the information on the label, 6 % fiber must be added and all bars are expected to have between 4 and 8 % fiber. 

Suppose that, due to supplier constraints, the plant only has 100 kg of fiber a day and each cereal bar weight 100 g. Whereupon, under current conditions, the processing plant will be able to produce 16,667 cereal bars day. The situation would be very different if we could improve the control of the machines so that the error in the added amount of fiber were 1 % instead of 2 %, as shown in the center of Fig. 9.6. In this case, you could add 5 % fiber and expect the bars to have between 4 and 6 % fiber. It is easy to calculate that in this new scenario, the plant could produce 20,000 cereal bars daily. Although not conclusive, it seems attractive to invest in improving the control system. 

Granola/muesli bars Energy bars Breakfast cereal bars Chocolate bars Mini-break bars Candies... 

Snack/cereal bars Stanol esters and free sterols UK and Ireland, USA... 

Snack bars or energy bars have been introduced to the market as providing a take-with food form with easy sterol dosing. The only products currently available on the market are Benecol energy bars in the USA, the UK and Ireland. Cereal bars eiuiched with free sterols have also been introduced for test marketing in the USA by Altus Foods under the Take Heart brand. 

Heenan, S., Soukoulis, C., Silcock, P. et al. (2012) PTR-TOF-MS monitoring of in vitro and in vivo flavour release in cereal bars with varying sugar composition. Food Chem. 131,477. 

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