Daniel Lubetzky

While I pride myself in the KIND culture embodied by our family at KIND, and while that includes always respecting our competitors, I couldn’t help commenting on the deceptive advertising by ThinkThin.

Fortunately the media has taken the lead to comment on how ThinkThin is an artificial blob of unpronounceable stuff and ranked ThinkThin as the WORST bar to consume.

But when I was walking by the Natural Products Expo East show and saw this sign, it prompted me to comment on how deceptive and deceitful it is.

First of all, their new tagline "It’s all about what’s inside" is embarrassing on their behalf, as "what’s inside" a ThinkThin bar is maltitol, an artificial product that does not exist in nature and does not belong in products proclaiming to be natural, along with other artificial ingredients that are hard to pronounce and that cause gas and bloating.

On top of that, they outright deceive consumers by comparing FRUIT & NUT bars to their bars, which contain no fruits, only nuts and artificial ingredients. They claim they have 70% less sugar that Fruit & Nut bars. But the way they achieve this feat is by a) including artificial sweeteners instead of real food like honey, and b) by excluding fruit but comparing themselves to a fruit bar. Well, fruit of course has natural sugar, and any nutritionist will recommend it to you. What nutritionists will not recommend is for you to eat maltitol or any of the unpronounceable stuff ThinkThin puts in their products.

If ThinkThin was honest it would have compared their Nut bars to NUT bars, such as KIND’s Nut Delight. If you make that comparison, their "70% less sugar" claim falls apart, and KIND’s Nut Delight, which doesn’t contain fruit, stands up much more favorably to the artificial nutritionals achieved by ThinkThin – with KIND’s product being totally natural and avoiding artificial sweeteners that are not found in nature, not to mention the supreme taste and quality of KIND products.

I have been in the natural industry for about 18 years and am proud that most companies are truly committed to truthfulness and integrity. It is disappointing when a few bad apples deceive consumers. ThinkThin has a history of trying to do so, growing, and then falling on its head and imploding when it is discovered. Its earlier incarnation was as a performance food bar that was supposed to make you smarter and all other sorts of nonsense. Then it imploded, and eventually it reinvented itself as a natural diet product, even though there is nothing natural about it.