Tuesday Notebook

Belatedly: Happy birthday, Dad. (And hey, this continues the celebration a day!)

My food bar has a blog: I was looking for low, low prices on Larabars (oops, I forgot the pretentious umlaut thing on the initial A), the very good and very simple and very vegan answer to PowerBar, ClifBar, Odwalla bars, Balance bars, and such. The first listing on Google is for the official and very Flash-y Lara site, and I went there. I noted immediately the presence of a blog; no big surprise there, as blogs have become official marketing tools for many blogs (the one I’d most like to see, if not read: a Preparation H blog (the butt-comfort product does not have a blog, but its site features brief video clips of three demographically representative adults shifting uncomfortably in their seats).

So what do you get on the Larabar blog? Right now, testimonials to the product in video form and tributes to fans of the product. Seeing this made me wonder whether any of the other bars have blogs. The rundown: PowerBar: no. ClifBar: yes. Balance: no. Odwalla: no.

As to the original quest for low-price Larabars. The product is interesting because each bar contains just a few ingredients, all stuff that you could buy at your local grocery (for instance, the ingredients list for the Pecan Pie flavor is dates, pecans, and almonds; no sugar and nothing like “soy protein isolate” or anything else emerging from a food lab somewhere). The drawback is the price: Andronico’s, the small, upscale Bay Area chain that doesn’t blush to put $10 tomato sauce on its shelves, sells Larabars for something like $1.90 to $2 a pop. Ridiculous. Other stores aren’t a lot better. So what kind of prices can you find online?

The Larabar site offers 16-unit boxes for $27 each; that’s about $1.69 each. REI sells Larabars online for $1.80 each, or $28.80 for 16 (REI stores used to give a 20 percent discount when you bought 12 or more food bars, but I think that’s no longer the case). With those numbers for comparison, here’s a non-encyclopedic spot check of online prices found through Google:

Vitacost.com: $18.83

FifFuel.com: $18.95

Drugstore.com: $20.99

Amazon.com: $22.35

Webvitamins: $23.90

VitaminShoppe: $24.95

VeganEssentials: $25.76

EdinaBike: $34.95

And of course: Buying online usually means you have to pay a shipping charge; some sites will charge tax, too.