Customized Trail Mix

Whether you are on a hike or a long car trip, only one food is better than trail mix. It’s customized trail mix.

Until yesterday the only way to get it just to your liking, however, was to go shopping for each of the ingredients you wanted and then put them together. But without a lot of calculations that few of us would bother to figure out, we wouldn’t have any idea how many calories, carbohydrates, and other nutrients those bags of trail mix would have.

Now, YouBars has expanded from their original customized nutrition bars, which last year I wrote about here. CEO Anthony Flynn offered me the chance to place an advance order for my own customized trail mix.

I just got my first order and have already begun to enjoy it. Yesterday evening, for example, I had a speaking engagement that took me a long way from home. So I was happy to have a bag of customized trail mix to eat as my dinner.

My Own MendosaMix (Please Choose a Different Name for Your Trail Mix)

It comes in individual serving sizes and has a customized name and nutrition facts printed on each package. The possible combinations are mind-boggling.

The first decision is to chose among small (35 gram), regular (45 gram), or large (55 gram) mix size. Then you get the opportunity to choose among 10 different nuts and whether you want fewer, regular, or more nuts. Likewise you can decide on how much of 11 different dried fruits you want in your packages. Then, you have your pick of up to five seeds, four crunchy grains, and 12 tasty additions.

If that’s not enough choice, the company is willing to consider special requests. A few months ago I suggested to Anthony that they regularly offer chia seeds, and they did so, both in their customized nutrition bars and customized trail mixes. Wow! Talk about customization!

You Trail Mix comes in individual serving packets for maximum freshness, portion control, and portability. Each regular-size bag of trail mix is $1.99. The small size is $1.89 each, and the large size is $2.19 each.

Beyond getting just what I want in my trail mix, convenience is a big attraction. But portion control is what I need most.

I like macadamia nuts the most. So much so that normally once I start I can’t stop until all the nuts in the container are gone. But I can limit myself to one packet of my customized trail mix.

Those of us who have diabetes clearly have special dietary needs. Because of our compromised immune systems, we’ve got to get better nutrition than most people. Besides that, each of us have different strategies for meeting our needs. Now we have an easy way to ensure that we get excellent nutrition even when we are away from home.

This article is based on an earlier version of my article published by HealthCentral.