This Week In Health and Fitness: Up your Snack Game With Newly Available Yunnan-Based Dali Bars

It's a common problem: you've just hopped off your bike after a long ride, just summited a mountain after a hard morning's hiking or just finished a sweaty workout at the gym and you want to reward yourself without undoing all of your hard work. While we can't stop you (nor would we blame you) from immediately heading to Great Leap for a double cheeseburger, now there is at least one more healthy option to steer you away from temptation following the Beijing launch of Kunming-based natural energy bar brand Dali Bars. 

Dali Bars are the brainchild of long-term Yunnan residents Colin Flahive (if you've ever spent time in Kunming you might have visited his popular coffee shop and restaurant, Salvador's) and Kris Ariel, who met in Dali in 2002. The pair were disappointed with the types of snacks available on the market, and found few were tasty, convenient, nutritious and all-natural. They began making experimental batches of Dali Bars in the kitchen of their café in Kunming, gradually perfecting their recipes and eventually being approached by a factory interested in helping them take production to the next level.

The Chinese characters in Dali Bar’s name mean “enhance power”. Colin and Kris chose the name as a pun on the city of Dali in Yunnan, where they had originally opened Salvador's. The brand's philosophy is that nature provides the best energy to power your body and as such the bars are made with only whole nuts, seeds, and dried fruits with no added sugar in order to provide a stable source of energy that doesn't cause spikes in blood sugar.

Most of the ingredients they use are imported, such as almonds and cranberries from the US and dates from the UAE. However, in order to be more sustainable, they are looking to source more ingredients from China and have already started using organic hemp seeds from Shilin County in eastern Yunnan and organic flax seeds from Dalian. 

The bars come in five flavors – fig-hempseed, cacao-almond, ginger-cashew, apple pie, and cranberry-coconut – all of which are available to purchase from branches of Jenny Lou's, Jenny Wang's, and April Gourmet across Beijing. Alternatively, if the general ease of delivery in China has made you too lazy to leave the house, the bars can also be purchased via Dali Bars' official Taobao store or their Weidian (RMB 13.5 for an individual bar, RMB 78 for a pack of six). 

I tried all the bars (I know, I know, the sacrifices we make for our readers ...) and my favorites are definitely the ginger-cashew, which has a fairly strong, spicy ginger flavor, and the apple pie, which is one of the sweeter ones thanks to the addition of apple alongside the dates that appear in all of the bars.

Asked about what motivates the team to keep pushing forward with Dali Bars and how they picture the future of the company, partner and marketing manager Dan Siekman says: “I think China is just at the front end of the sort of lifestyle-induced public health nightmare that has been afflicting other countries to various extents for many decades. Given how fast everything happens here, maybe there’s some hope that in five years, the nation will already be starting to collectively come out the other side and start spending more time and effort on cultivating healthy habits and reducing mental and physical stresses. Hopefully, by giving people some tools to support habits of physical activity and balanced nutrition we can be a part of that.”

However, the company's vision goes beyond simple healthy eating, as Colin explains in a video on the Dali Bars website. "My hope is that Dali Bar can become something more than just a sustainable business. We want to empower our customers with the ability to help better our planet in their small way, so we have partnered with One Percent for the Planet, which means that one percent of our sales go to conservation projects throughout Yunnan.”

More stories by this author here.

Instagram: @gongbaobeijing
Twitter: @gongbaobeijing
Weibo: @宫保北京

Photos courtesy of Dali Bars, Robynne Tindall