Larabar Cashew Cookie: 4g Protein, 2-Ingredient Bar, Labelgrade B (75/100)

The short answer

Larabar Cashew Cookie is two foods pressed into a bar — cashews and dates, nothing else — delivering 4 g of protein and 16 g of all-natural sugar in a 1.7 oz (48 g) bar at 230 calories (USDA FDC 2741559). It earns a Labelgrade B (75/100), and the grade tells the whole story: it has the shortest ingredient panel of any bar we’ve graded, but it is a fruit-and-nut snack, not a protein bar. The 4 g of protein is low and incidental (it’s just what cashews carry), and the 16 g of date sugar is high. Treat it as a portable handful of dates and cashews — superb clean fuel, not a protein source.

Why the B

The composite lands at 75 (B): a best-in-class ingredient panel held down by the two lines a date-and-nut bar can never win — protein and sugar. Labelgrade scores the macros on the label, not the elegance of the recipe, so the C and C- pull as hard as the B+ pushes.

The two-ingredient trade-off, in plain numbers

The entire appeal of this bar is what’s not in it. Dates are the binder and the sweetener; cashews are the structure and the fat. There’s no brown rice syrup, no protein isolate, no glycerine, no lecithin — the things that let other bars hit a macro target. Strip all of that out and you’re left with exactly what dried fruit and nuts are: carb-and-fat-dense, protein-light. So the same decision that makes the label clean is the decision that caps the protein at 4 g and floats the sugar to 16 g. You can’t have the two-word panel and a high-protein, low-sugar macro — the cashew-and-date recipe is physically one or the other.

How it stacks up against the bars next to it

Read across one row and the positioning is obvious. RXBAR is the instructive comparison: it adds five ingredients to Larabar’s two — chiefly egg whites — and gets three times the protein (12 g vs 4 g) for slightly less sugar and the same calories. That is the whole case against Larabar as a protein bar, in one line. Kind keeps the lowest sugar of the group (9 g) but does it with a ~14-item panel including added glucose and honey — the opposite of Larabar’s strategy. GoMacro matches the plant-protein crowd at 11 g but only by making organic brown rice syrup its first ingredient, the lone bar here with real added sugar (12 g). Larabar’s edge is singular and absolute: nobody else’s label is two words long. Its weakness is equally singular: it’s last on protein, every time.

Whole-food equivalent

This bar barely qualifies as “packaged food” — it essentially is a serving of dates and cashews: roughly 4 medjool dates plus a small handful of cashews, which is approximately the recipe by weight. Put differently, the 4 g of protein is about what you’d get from half an ounce of cooked chicken breast — a rounding error in a protein plan. So buy it for what it is: clean, shelf-stable, date-and-nut energy you can throw in a jacket pocket, not a recovery food.

Scope

This page covers Larabar Cashew Cookie in the 1.7 oz (48 g) single-bar format (UPC 00021908509259, USDA FDC 2741559). Larabar runs 20+ flavors on the same minimal-ingredient idea, but the panels differ:

• Cashew Cookie (this product) — 2 ingredients
• Apple Pie, Cherry Pie, Pecan Pie, Peanut Butter Cookie — 3–5 ingredients each
• Larabar Protein sub-line — adds pea/soy protein for a higher protein number (a genuinely different product)
• Larabar Kids, Fruits & Greens — adjacent lines

Per-bar protein and sugar move with the flavor (most core flavors land at 3–6 g protein and 15–20 g natural sugar). Always read the bar in your hand.

Ingredients

Cashews, dates. (Verbatim from the USDA Branded Foods entry, FDC 2741559 — and that genuinely is the whole list.)

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Scope: This page applies specifically to Larabar Cashew Cookie Fruit & Nut Bar (1.7 oz (48 g) bar) · UPC 00021908509259. Other sizes, flavors, or formulations may differ.