The Daily Bar

We love The Daily Bar for so many reasons, the ingredients, the beautiful packaging, the sustainability, the social awareness, the storytelling, would you mind telling us the story of how the brand came about and why all these parts are so important to its dna?

Essentially we’re trying to promote a lifestyle that encompasses all these things, a conscious, healthy, forward thinking lifestyle ~ and snack bars are our language, they are the way in which we have chosen to communicate to the masses, because everyone loves to snack!

And as for the birth of the brand as cliché as it sounds, initially I just felt like there was a huge gap in the market for a truly healthy snack and from that point I began to really evaluate how I could create a brand with impact. I felt like there was so much opportunity, and to some extent, necessity to bring purist health in to the mainstream, and an absolute necessity for businesses to reduce their impact on the planet! And a nice aesthetic has never hurt anyone either.

Every great business is made up of great people, what are yourself and the Daily Bar team likely to do on a typical day, like, what makes you tick and what are you into?

What makes me tick, now that is a big can of worms that i’m still figuring out. But I guess living in a place like Byron, where the environment and the community are such a focal part of our lives, it’s a constant reminder of how it’s really just the simple things that are what’s most important, connection to the planet, connection to each other, and I think I’ve found a great deal of freedom in my life realising this. Having said that, I’m by no means a sit-still simple living person, and on any given day you can find me trying to jam pack as much into daylight hours as possible, usually a combination of movement, coffee, good people, good food, surfing, and ironically; now busiest fuelling the hoards of other busy people out there, but truly I wouldn’t have it any other way.

You are really good at blending unexpected ingredients with impeccable outcomes, can you tell us a little about your process?

Well I’m a foodie at heart, but also just know personally how great eating really well makes me feel, I also think health food can be a little bit exclusionary and dare I say boring at times. So the big challenge is always how can I create something within my fussy set of health values that is first and foremost delicious, and will be able to lure in even the not so health food inclined.

A huge part of our ethos is to be really low in natural sugars, a huge portion of the ‘healthy’ snack bar market is made up of date-filled natural sugar bombs. The thing about sugar, is not only will it be the death of you (literally) but it just masks other flavours, so I love playing around with some exotic and lesser known ingredients and letting their flavour profiles shine. Yes it is just as fun as it sounds!

You talk about the fun of ‘trial and error’ and we can only imagine some of the crazy concoctions you’ve stirred up, what are the craziest ones, or craziest moments you’ve encountered along the way?

I think my greatest feat to date was perfecting our espresso flavoured bar. We have some serious coffee snobs on the team (I love coffee, but am definitely no snob) and boy did I have my work cut out for me getting the flavour profile right. I remember being pretty wrapped with one of my initial trials and then it getting absolutely torn to shreds. Water is the number one enemy of our shelf life, so traditional brewing wasn’t an option, but I ended up working with a barista and learning a method of espresso extraction that worked within our constraints. Challenge accepted and now the Hemp Espresso Fudge bar is one of our top sellers!

There is so much to be said about the dance between what we see on a label and what we’re actually putting into our bodies, have you found it difficult to stay true to the Daily Bar’s original intention, or have you almost nearly maybe kinda tossed some nasty preservatives into the cauldron?

It’s funny you mention this, because this is without a doubt my biggest bug bare with our food system and to date has been our hardest challenge to overcome. Real alive food just wasn’t created to sit on a supermarket shelf for 12 months, but long shelf life is ‘convenient’ for producers, ‘convenient’ for retailers and so in goes the nasty preservatives, we’ve just lost the meaning of food, it just doesn’t make sense to me!I am stubborn as hell, so it’s simply never been an option to steer away from my real food beliefs, we’ve just had to become really creative about how we navigate through this pretty archaic food industry.

E-commerce is an amazing avenue though, we’re able to get bars made fresh in our kitchen each week to anyone in Australia overnight, I see this as the real future of providing real food to the masses. E-commerce isn’t quite there yet though in terms of being mainstream for food shopping, so in the pursuit of trying to get our product in the hands of as many people as possible, after months of deliberation we’ve decided that we’re soon going to become a refrigerated shop product. We never want to compromise the integrity of our product, we just want to toss together a handful of real raw natural ingredients and get it out to as many people as possible. So look out for The Daily Bar in the fridge sitting next to your other fresh food products really soon!

We are so lucky to live and work in arguably the most beautiful region on earth, can you tell us about your personal favourites?

Honestly nothing gets me more excited than the mad after-work dash to The Pass, when the sun is setting and the little waves are peeling. I’ve found surfing to be my perfect busy day antidote, I haven’t found any other feeling quite like it, within moments the sea literally washes the day away, it’s truly magical.

Byron Bay and the surrounding region is exploding with new food, fresh thinking entrepreneurial producers, businesses that are flourishing, and you guys are clearly one of them, is there something in the water here, or better still, something NOT in the water?

We’re in this really amazing community of thinkers that have realised there really is a new way to do business, that a successful business means so much more than just being profit driven, that it’s possible to make money without destroying the earth or ripping someone less fortunate off in the process, and I think that in itself is really contagious. Of course we all want to do good in the world (well I like to think so anyway) but unfortunately somewhere along the way, as a society we became disengaged from this, it all just seemed too big and too hard.So I think the real momentum in this movement comes from educating and empowering people to make these conscious decisions themselves, it’s an infectious feeling being a good human, I think we’re all wired to live this way, we sometimes just need a point in the right direction to find the tools to access it within ourselves.

We know the sun is going to keep rising and those beautiful waves will keep rolling through The Pass, but what’s next for The Daily Bar?

Well we’re dreamers that’s for sure! But we’re continually frustrated by the archaic mindsets and norms within the food system, for young fresh eyes, a lot of things just don’t make sense in terms of the bigger picture; I mean, what we eat, how we fuel ourselves; so ultimately our health and how we feel, it’s all pretty much driven by commercial viability. So I guess the big dream is to create an overarching food brand that challenges this. It’s pretty simple we just want to create honestly healthy food, that’s accessible, that’s good for us, good for the planet, and at the end of the day, that gets people excited!

Now that people are in love with the story and probably want to try the Daily Bar for themselves, should we give them a link to your online store?

Well if you’re still with us, congratulations for sitting through that! You can find us here: www.thedailybar.co ~ and here’s as a thank you for listening to me ramble: this code will give you a cheeky 20% off your first order: ATLANTIC