Date & Fruit Energy Bar

A date and fruit energy bar is a cold-formed snack rather than a baked one: date paste from Phoenix dactylifera is milled into a plastic mass, dried fruit, nuts and seeds are folded in, and the dough is sheeted, slab-pressed and guillotined. Dates do the work of three ingredients at once, acting as sweetener, binder and fibre carrier. Deglet noor dates run about 282 kcal per 100 g with 20.5 g water, 75 g carbohydrate of which 63 g is sugars, 8 g dietary fibre and 2.4 g protein, so the sugar in the finished bar is intrinsic fruit sugar rather than added sucrose or glucose syrup. That composition is what makes the format commercially useful. Because no mono- or disaccharide is added, a correctly built bar can carry "with no added sugars" under Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006, and dates plus seeds normally clear the 3 g per 100 g threshold for "source of fibre" and often the 6 g threshold for "high fibre". Shelf stability is a water-activity problem rather than a preservative one: bars are formulated to aw 0.50-0.65, and below aw 0.60 no microbial proliferation occurs at all. Thovek builds to the buyer's recipe, bar weight, texture target and wrap, from 20 g mini formats to 60 g meal-style bars. Allergen and diet status is set by the inclusion list, and we declare it per recipe rather than generically. The base of dates, dried fruit and seeds is vegan, contains no milk, egg, soy, fish or crustacean material, and is naturally gluten-free. Almond, cashew, peanut, walnut and pistachio inclusions bring tree-nut and peanut declarations; oat or wheat crisps bring gluten, so gluten-free lots use certified gluten-free oats or drop cereal entirely; and dried apricot, raisin or mango can carry residual sulphur dioxide, which is declared where it exceeds 10 mg/kg in the finished bar. Organic (NPOP, NOP, EU), halal and kosher documentation is available on the same lines.