Case Study · Product & Innovation

100 mg of caffeine in 100 calories.

How Snackteva delivered a functional energy bar that hit 100 mg of caffeine in a 100-calorie format: a spec a previous formulator said couldn’t be done.

The Situation

A functional-nutrition brand came to us with a target most people in the category would call impossible: a bar that delivered 100 mg of caffeine while staying at or under 100 calories. They had already worked with another formulator who tried and concluded the spec couldn’t be met without the product tasting bitter, chalky, or falling apart on the line.

The math is the problem. Caffeine at that dose is intensely bitter, and the usual tricks for masking it, more sugar, more fat, more binder, all add calories the format simply doesn’t have room for. Every gram of masking agent competes with the calorie ceiling.

What We Built

We treated it as a systems problem, not a recipe problem. Instead of masking the caffeine after the fact, we redesigned the base so the bitterness had less to fight against: selecting a caffeine source with a cleaner profile, restructuring the sweetener system to do more with fewer calories, and adjusting the texture so the bar read as indulgent rather than diet.

This kind of work sits at the center of our food product development practice: we don’t just hand over a formula, we build the documentation and process around it so the brand can hand it to a co-packer and get the same bar every run.

The Result

We delivered a validated prototype that hit the full spec: 100 mg of caffeine, at or under 100 calories, with a taste and texture the brand signed off on, along with a production plan ready to move into scale-up. We were the second formulator to take on the target, and the first to solve it.