Starbucks Gluten Free Fruit & Nut Bar

The Starbucks Gluten Free Fruit and Nut Bar costs £2.65 and carries 310 calories with 3.6g of fibre and 19g of sugar. A bar of dried fruit and mixed nuts.

One thing about this item needs saying before anything else. The name says gluten free and the data Starbucks publishes carries no gluten free dietary label against it, unlike the Classic Porridge and the egg bites, which do. Its allergen list also includes oat. Anyone coeliac should ask the store for the current packaging rather than rely on the product name.

The allergen list is the longest of any snack here: oat, walnuts, almonds, pecan and milk, with three separate tree nuts named individually. That specificity is useful, since a tree nut allergy is rarely to all of them, and it is a fair signal that the bar contains real nuts in quantity rather than a trace.

8.5g of saturated fat is high for something that reads as a health snack and points at the milk in the list, most likely as chocolate or a yoghurt coating. Nut fats are largely unsaturated, so the nuts themselves account for little of that figure.

3.6g of fibre is genuinely good and among the best in the category, and 19g of sugar comes mostly from dried fruit, concentrated as it always is by the drying. Protein at 4.7g is respectable.

Bars of this type occupy an awkward middle ground, marketed as the sensible option and constructed like confectionery. Dried fruit, nuts and a binding syrup produce a genuinely useful fibre figure alongside a sugar figure close to a chocolate bar, and which of those matters more depends entirely on why someone reached for it.

No diet labels are published at all. Prices reach £3.65 on delivery. The snacking cheese is the higher protein option at 11g.