Phoenix Bars: The High-Calorie Bars Made for Days On Camp
A Kaizen weekend asks a lot of your body. Eight or more sessions, trail runs from 5 to 15km, hikes of two to five hours in the fells, strength work in between, and cold water every day. We feed everyone properly at mealtimes, but the question we get asked constantly is what to carry for the gaps: the stretch between the morning run and the gym session, the summit stop three hours into a hike, the moment you are out of the plunge and your body wants energy now.
Our answer for those gaps is calorie density: the most energy in the smallest, easiest-to-eat package. And a product built entirely around that idea recently landed on our radar: Phoenix Bars.
We got talking to James Frost, the founder of Flaming Phoenix, earlier this year. He is a mate of ours as him and George went to Exeter University together and were both part of the rugby cub, but the reason he is in this post is what he has built. His high-calorie bars are made in the UK and pack up to 557 calories and 19g of protein into a 120g bar that is smaller than your phone, and he still hand-packs every order himself from Surrey. They are vegan, gluten-free, soft enough to eat when hard efforts have blunted your appetite, and they hold up in a pack in any weather, which matters when your food spends five hours in a bag on a Lakeland ridge. They have been carried at the Marathon des Sables and on multi-day endurance events, and they are rated 4.9 from over 380 reviews. If you want to see how they compare with everything else on the market, James publishes a ranking of the highest calorie bars in the UK by calories per gram, with his own bar’s numbers alongside everyone else’s, which is a level of transparency we like.
The crossover with what we do is obvious. Camp Kaizen days regularly burn 4,000 calories or more, and under-fuelling day one is the single most common reason day three feels like survival rather than training. One or two dense bars in a hip pack or hiking bag is the simplest insurance policy there is against that. A detail worth knowing: the bars can be crumbled into hot water to make a quick porridge, which sounds like a genuinely good pre-hike breakfast option in a bell tent.
We are not sponsored by Flaming Phoenix and this is not a partnership. It is a product built by someone who understands multi-day output, aimed at exactly the problem every camper has. We have a box on the way to put through its paces on our own training days, and they are worth a look for yours.