Plenny Protein Bars
Reviewed on 30 September 2025
🛍️ Product Details
- Name
- Cookies & Cream, Brownie
- Type
- Health Fitness
- Brand
- Jimmy Joy
- My Rating
- ★★★★★
Where to Find
Jimmy Joy.
My Experience
Essentially, the Plenny Protein Bars are half a meal bar but with a bigger protein and fibre kick for their size. Packing 15g of protein and around 9g of fibre into a sub-200 calorie format, they're designed as a nutritionally complete snack. I tried two flavours from the variety pack: Cookies & Cream and Brownie.
Plenny Protein Bar: Cookies & Cream
This was a pleasant surprise. On opening, the bar has a distinct dark chocolate smell and the taste was better than I expected. The bar is firm while still being soft to bite into, and I found it was noticeably softer than the larger Plenny meal bars. The sweetness comes from sugar alcohols (polyols) instead of actual sugar, which gives it a nice cocoa cookie taste with some crunchy cocoa crispies inside.
For a quality, convenient snack, this gets 4 stars.
Plenny Protein Bar: Brownie
Next is the Brownie flavour, and unfortunately, this one was a miss for me.
The main issue is that it's far too sweet, even more so than the Cookies & Cream bar. I noticed that in addition to the crispy cocoa bits, this version also has larger, less frequent, soft and clear fudge-like bits. When you bite into one of these, you get a really intense hit of sweetness.
This sweetness ultimately overpowered any specific brownie flavour. To me, it just tasted like a generic sweet chocolate bar. Because the flavour was so indistinct and the sweetness was off-putting, this one is a 2 stars.
💭 Final Thoughts
The most surprising takeaway is how two bars with nearly identical ingredient lists can offer such different experiences. The deciding factor is the mixing of the 'soluble gluco fibre' binder.
In the Cookies & Cream bar, it's integrated evenly, creating a pleasant and consistent taste. In the Brownie bar, however, it forms distinct, fudge-like pockets. In my opinion, this was a poor manufacturing choice, as these hotspots of intense sweetness overwhelm any actual flavour and make the bar sickly. It's a clear example of how the process, not just the ingredients, defines the final product.
Finally, it's worth remembering that both bars use sugar alcohols, so eating them in moderation is a good idea. For some people, overindulging can lead to digestive issues.