Quest Bars in Europe: Where to buy your fix

Quest Bars have been blowing up the fitness blogosphere lately. It seems like every healthy living blog I follow in the U.S.  has had something to say about these popular protein bars, so my interest was piqued. Except unlike all the U.S.-based readers, I couldn’t just stroll down to my neighborhood GNC, plop down $2.50 and walk out with a Quest Bar. So I turned to the internet to find out where to buy these hyped-up rectangles of chewy goodness in Europe and found out a few things along the way.

Read on!

Where to buy Quest Bars in Europe

Before I get started, just a note about Oui In France’s content going forward. I’m shifting focus and you can read more about that here.

I’ve been on a Quest Bar kick recently ever since trying them over the summer. I gladly shelled out my euros and dollars to try out a whole variety of Quest Protein Bar flavors. My faves? Cookie Dough and Cookies & Cream. I incorporate protein bars into my routine/meal planning a few days a week and they make great snacks when you have nothing healthy on hand.

Protein bars run the gamut from healthy and made with relatively clean ingredients to ones whose ingredient lists read more like candy bars packed with loads of sugar and other artificial junk. Quest Bars are on the healthy end of the spectrum and actually taste really good.

That said, let’s keep in mind that we’re talking about protein bars here and not gourmet candy bars. Quest Bars taste great for a protein bar and are excellent heated up too.

So enter my quest for Quest Bars. I want to know where to buy Quest Bars in Europe. Good ol’ Google to the rescue.

So first, where to buy Quest Bars in Europe:

Optigura.com — I’ve ordered from Optigura twice and they have a great selection of Quest Bars as well as other products. Delivery is fast and free if your purchase is over 49 euros.

Amazon.fr — Amazon never lets me down! You can find everything you need here including Quest Bars.

Proteinpickandmix.co.uk — This UK-based site has lots of cool stuff and delivers all over Europe.

Biovea.net — A French site for all your Quest Bar needs.

Quest Bars in Europe… what I learned

1. Like with most things, anything imported is going to be ridiculously expensive compared to U.S. prices.

Quest Bars aren’t cheap to begin with but European sites’ prices will make you want to faint. How much do Quest Bars cost? In the U.S., a single bar is between $2.10 and $2.60 or so depending on where you shop and if there’s a discount. How much are Quest Bars in Europe? Brace yourselves — they cost just 3 euros each. Which is a painstaking US$3.70, depending on the exchange rate. Yikes.

But, the good news is that you can find promo codes on the web and reduce the cost by buying a box of 12 instead of individual bars once you find a flavor you like.

2. Quest Bars are formulated differently in Europe.

I repeat, yes, the ingredients for Quest Bars in Europe are NOT exactly the same as they are in the U.S. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. How’d I figure this out? I bought some Quest Bars off a European site and thought they tasted overly salty and NOT good at all. I figured all the American bloggers who raved about Quest Bars had messed up taste buds or were just really, really hungry if they thought these bars actually tasted good.

I emailed Quest Nutrition and they confirmed the Quest Bars sold in the EU are formulated differently to be in compliance with regulations here. Could that be why they tasted weird to me? Quest’s answer? No, I most likely just got a bad batch. I had nothing to compare it with since I had never tasted a Quest Bar before in the U.S.

Do Europe Quest Bars taste worse than the U.S. ones? I’ll never know because that was the first and last time I bought Quest Bars in Europe. Instead, I hauled back several boxes of American Quest Bars in my suitcase in September after visiting my family. And they are absolutely delicious. Quest Bars are my care package staple.

So where do you buy your Quest Bars in Europe? Are you a fan?