PAIGE GREEN
Partnerships are integral to many facets of public and private organizations. It’s no different in the healthy living space.
Healthy New Albany’s partnership with Jambar, a California-based company founded by PowerBar creator Jenny Maxwell, is a local example of how shared goals and values can offer unique opportunities for collaborations between organizations.
Jambar is donating its bars to be given out at HNA races this season, including the New Albany Walking Classic, as the energy bar company shares a mission similar to HNA’s.
“Philosophically, our company is totally committed to healthy living and music,” Maxwell says. “We donate resources … usually it’s just bars, to organizations that contribute to active living.”
Jambar launched in October 2021. Maxwell says she set out to make an organic energy bar that’s higher quality, better tasting and uses more natural ingredients than any competitors.
“Ingredients, care and love make Jambar different,” she says.
When Maxwell and her late husband, Brian, started working on the PowerBar concept in 1985, it was near the start of the public interest in energy bars. At the time, the nutrition-packed snacks were targeted at endurance athletes. While energy bars remain popular with athletes, they’ve been adopted broadly as an easy on-the-go snack.
Maxwell and her husband stepped away from the industry after selling the company for an estimated $375 million in 2000. It wasn’t until 30 years after having the initial idea of an energy bar, that Maxwell, in 2015, found herself critiquing the current energy bar options out there.
Her family encouraged her, confident that she could improve the contemporary energy bar. Still,
Maxwell didn’t think the world needed just another energy bar and searched for ways to connect the company to her other values.
There has to be something else,” Maxwell says. “There has to be something bigger than just another energy bar. So I thought, ‘Why don’t I combine my passions?’”
A life-long athlete and later-in-life musician, Maxwell’s background is in food science. As she did for PowerBar years before, she was able to formulate a recipe in her kitchen. It took four years of work to get everything right, including the wrapper, the name and the business plan before the bars were ready to market.
Life-long Learner
Music became one of Maxwell’s passions after she found it as a means of healing in the wake of her husband’s death in 2004.
“It took me a couple of years to get my strength under me to figure out how to move forward raising my family,” says Maxwell, a mother to six children, whose youngest was seven months old at the time of Brian’s passing.
In 2007, at the age of 40, she took up drumming. Learning music proved challenging. Maxwell says that it took her nearly a decade, but she can now confidently express herself on the drums. She currently plays in two different bands and across a range of genres from rock to Latin jazz.
Her love for music became an important part of Jambar as she developed the concept.
“Music is a huge part of the brand,” she says. “We promote music education through giving, usually just bars to organizations that promote music – it could be music education, it could be music performance, schools, mobile concerts.”
Setting the Bar High
PAIGE GREEN
Jambar offers four different flavors, each with its own distinct taste as Jambar doesn’t use a base formula.
Two bars – Jammin’ Jazzleberry and Musical Mango – are plant based and two – Malt Nut Medley and Chocolate Cha Cha – are whey protein based. All are made with real food ingredients only and have 9-10 grams of protein.
“I didn’t want to use tapioca syrup and brown rice syrup,” Maxwell says. “I wanted to be more natural.”
Instead of those processed ingredients, the bars are sweetened with maple syrup, honey, grape sugar and dates.
One benefit of stepping back into the industry now is that natural ingredients have become much
more common than when Maxwell left PowerBar more than 20 years ago.
“As a food scientist, I have options and innovations with food that I didn’t have,” she says, “which is pretty cool.”
The bars are produced in a state-of-the-art facility, and the company is growing at a steady rate, Maxwell says. But the intention is to stay small to better maintain Jambar’s values.
“We focus on quality for sure and our commitment to the community,” she says.
Jambar distribution is mostly on the West Coast, but the bars have found their way across the country through partnerships and online ordering. That makes the bars’ inclusion in Walking Classic swag bags all the more unique as many attendees will have the opportunity to try the bars for the first time.
Find more information about Jambar at www.jambar.com.
Claire Miller is an editor at CityScene Media Group. Feedback welcome at cmiller@cityscenemediagroup.com.
