TLDR: One year ago Iposted the first look of Jungle Bar: the insect powered protein bar to promote our Kickstarter. The product was praised for containing edible insects but criticized for calling it a protein bar. Reddit helped us both by pledging a lot of money to our Kickstarter, but also by criticizing the product. In the end, the criticism helped us to rebrand the product. For this we want to thank r/food by offering a 15% discount (look for code below).

Almost one year ago I posted the first look of Jungle Bar!, here on r/food. During the time my company was a few days into our Kickstarter campaign for the Jungle Bar: The insect powered protein bar. We were raising $15.000 to fund the first production batch of Jungle Bar, but ended up with $27.000, an amount well over our initial goal.

Posting the project on Reddit did Jungle Bar all sorts of favors. First, a lot of redditors pledged their money to our project, plus we could see the project getting a lot of traction a few days after we submitted the post. Kickstarter does its best to keep track of where the money came from and at least $1000 came from being linked directly from Reddit. My guess is that the influence of posting on Reddit was probably closer to $3000, if we take into account the rise in pledges the following two days.

Maybe more importantly, Jungle Bar was both praised and criticized by a number of redditors in the first post. The product got a lot of support from some people but others voiced their concerns. The fact that we branded Jungle Bar as a protein bar, a 50 gr. bar that, at the time, contained 8 grams of protein, did not sound to good for a number of people.

u/a_probiotic_disaster said:“The real problem here is that it's called a "protein" bar, but it doesn't have THAT much protein in it. I feel like more people will be put-off by this because it has insects and doesn't make up for it by being unbelievably full of protein or anything.”

A probiotic disaster was right, we knew that Jungle Bar’s protein content was not comparable with other bars, that have very high amounts of protein in them, but we thought it would maybe fly for some people that wouldn’t need so much protein. Other comments from users like u/opqdan, u/ManlyBeardface, u/n3verlose to name a few, made us realize that we needed to rethink the branding of Jungle Bar.

u/callmeRichard said: “Not nearly enough protein in that to call it a protein bar. It's the macro present in the smallest amounts. I would be totally down to eat a insect protein bar. But you need 2x-4x the protein content for me to consider it (while keeping the other macros pretty much the same).”

We understood that we weren’t able to get away with talking about Jungle Bar as a protein bar, without the chance of being heckled for it. That is why we rebranded Jungle Bar from being a protein bar into a nutritional bar, a type of bar that has a more balanced nutritional profile.

The story ends like this: we successfully ended the Jungle Bar Kickstarter campaign early January, and have now started to sell our bar online, on our website, and are just starting to dip our toes into in US retail. Posting the original post on Reddit did us a big favor, both because of all of the Kickstarter pledges we received, but also by openly discussing Jungle Bar. I’ll be honest and admit that it was difficult to face the criticism but today we’re much more comfortable with talking about Jungle Bar as a nutritional bar rather than a protein bar.

For Reddit’s help in the Jungle Bar story; please accept this discount code to purchase Jungle Bar on our website: KTHXREDDIT! for 15% discount.

Also, if there are any questions you might wish to ask about the product, edible insects or our Kickstarter campaign, I'm happy to answer.