THE BIG BATTLE OVER FAKE FAT

How the “SECRET SAUCE” in America’s HOTTEST NEW BRAND of protein bars sparked a STORM of CONTROVERSY and UPENDED the PROTEIN BAR market.

- TOM FOSTER

MCKAY FUGAL WOKE UP TO AN EMAIL ONE MORNING THIS PAST SPRING THAT MADE HIS STOMACH DROP.

The subject line was unremarkable, the tone polite. But the message in the attached document was devastating. Epogee, the supplier of the most critical ingredient in the line of low-fat, high-protein chocolate bars he'd helped invent, was cutting the business off. No negotiation, no warning. Just a brief note to say that any pending orders would be fulfilled, but then no more, effective immediately.

Together, Fugal and his wife, Leilani, had spent the past three years building their startup, Defiant Chocolate, out of a rented commercial kitchen south of Salt Lake City. Mckay, a competitive bodybuilder and commercial real estate broker by day, and Leilani, a former college basketball player who worked full-time at the startup, weren't in business just for a payday. Defiant was their dream—their after-hours obsession—and it was their answer to a massive gap in the health food market.

To make their chocolate bars somewhat healthy, replacing the sugar was easy enough: Defiant settled on a mix of erythritol and monk fruit as the sweetener. But then they had to address the fat content—because, well, without fat, you don’t have chocolate. By just reducing the fat and boosting the protein, they'd end up with a dry, chalky bar that nobody would want to eat. Trickier still, adding protein raised the calorie count too high. They needed something to replace the fat that would still allow for a creamy, rich texture—which they eventually found, via Google, in a lab-engineered fat substitute called EPG, manufactured by a little-known Indianapolis-based company called Epogee.