Buy some cricket-, Reishi mushroom- or spirulina-based protein bars and plant a tree. Not you, per se, but someone will plant a tree for you. All you have to do is buy the tasty bars.
That’s the idea behind a not-as-outlandish-as-you-might-think Montreal company that’s moving away from pea protein-based vegan powders (e.g. Vega and Sunwarrior). Landish is a new local startup grinding their blends of hemp, pumpkin and sunflower seeds into plant-based powders powders and bars. The powders come with either immune-boosting reishi with chai or chocolate, energizing spirulina with vanilla or cricket with chocolate or vanilla.
Bars come in six flavours: reishi with vanilla chai or chocolate espresso; spirulina with vanilla coconut or double chocolate; or cricket with apple cinnamon or mint chocolate.
If you’re thinking cricket sounds gross, just go with the others. More cricket for me.
They’re all dairy free, soy free, peanut free and gluten free. The bars use gluten free oats (except the cricket bars, which use buckwheat). And they’re all sweetened with brown rice syrup. The apple cinnamon cricket bars also have apple juice concentrate, but the same 7 g of sugar as the spirulina bar; the reishi bars have 6 g of sugar. The powders are sugar-free, as the founders of Landish figure you’re smart enough to sweeten them to taste by yourself with whatever you like, from stevia to honey to maple syrup to cane juice or sweetened almond milk.
Nutritional Info
There are 9-13 grams of fat per bar, a little over 200 calories and a lot of nutrients. The spirulina bars have 35% of your daily iron and magnesium anda . serving of the reishi powder has 45% of your daily magnesium.
How do they taste?
I tried the reishi protein powder, which is more like ground seeds than the super-smooth powders you get from Vega et al. So if you stir the Landish powder into milk or yogurt, there’s going to be some extra texture there. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, except if you use something really watery like almond milk or juice, because the powder will sink to the bottom of pretty fast and you’ll constantly be stirring it back in. I ended up blending it into smoothies and sprinkling it on top of chopped fruit, which solved the problem, and I loved the nuttiness of it and the sweet spices of the chai. Each hit of cinnamon, ginger, cardamom and cloves made me happy.
I also like that there’s always a non-chocolate option for each super food flavour. Some of us have dumb reactions to caffeine – and to oats, even the gluten free kind.
Price
Prices are good for the quality. I’d actually use these. And I’d grab a box of bars for a climbing trip. If you order online, you can buy packs of 24 bars for $2.50 a bar (two, two, six or eight flavours per box). There’s also a subscription option online, so you can get your favourite bars and powders delivered on a regular basis. Sounds like a good option for companies. And shipping’s free. I’d just buy in bulk if I was eating them regularly.
You’re going to start seeing these bars sold individually (for a bit more money) at retail locations around Montreal and elsewhere, so if you want to try just one or two for your next long day at the office or weekend hike, that’s the way to go.
The jars of powder are about the same size and price as the Vega smoothie packs, but more expensive and smaller than the best known vegan protein powder brands, but it’s a small company using quality ingredients, so I think it was a good idea to keep the 300 g containers of powder at $30.
Overall, I give this company a big thumbs up, especially their reforestation policy with OneTreePlanted to plant a tree for every online order that comes from a person in Quebec. The company’s website also says that the spirulina, reishi and crickets (as well as the sweeteners and other ingredients including tapioca fibre, seeds, pectin and natural flavours) are sustainably sourced.
And as a food copy-writer and founder of my own food startup, I also need to give them credit for their slick branding.
Check them out! landish.ca
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