Trek Cocoa Oat Protein Flapjack Review: Worth It?

The Trek Cocoa Oat Protein Flapjack is a plant-based snack bar with 9g of protein per bar, wrapped in a chewy oaty flapjack that tastes far more like a treat than a health food. Below we cover the taste and texture, what Trek actually put in it, and whether it's still worth buying at today's price. The short version: the bar is as good as ever, but the price on this particular box has gone the wrong way.

Trek is one of the UK's better-known makers of nutritional snacks, specialising in protein-rich, plant-based food. Their flapjack range is vegan friendly and gluten free, which makes it a rare thing: a protein snack that works for gluten-sensitive vegans and coeliacs alike.

Taste and texture

The flavour is exactly what you'd hope for, flapjack-y and chocolatey, and the consistent theme across owner reviews is that the cocoa and oat combination works. It's possibly a touch sweet for certain tastes, but it's not an overpowering sweetness.

The bars are chewy without being crumbly, with a moist texture and a balanced flavour. You'd swear they'd slipped some gluten in there to get them this chewy, but no, Trek's flapjacks are gluten free, which is what makes them a genuinely useful option for gluten-sensitive vegans and coeliacs.

They work well as a rushed-morning breakfast or a pre-session top-up, which is the job most people seem to buy them for.

Nutrition

Trek list 9g of plant-based protein per 50g bar, and the bars are a source of fibre thanks to the oat base. That protein figure is decent for a flapjack: it won't rival a dedicated protein bar, but it's a real contribution from a whole-food-ish snack rather than a chalky isolate.

Beyond that, treat these as an energy-dense snack. The oats, syrup and chocolate topping that make them taste good also make them a meaningful chunk of calories, so a second bar is not a free hit. Trek quote the full breakdown of energy, fat, carbohydrate and salt on the pack itself, and that panel is the number to trust, so check it if you're tracking macros closely.

For context on where a flapjack fits in a day's eating, the NHS Eatwell Guide is a sensible reference point: bars like this are a convenience, not a foundation.

Cost and value

This is the part that has changed, and not in a good way. The Cocoa Oat 16-bar box used to sell at around £16.80, roughly £1 per flapjack, which made it an easy value pick. At the time of writing it's listed at £39.99, about £2.50 a bar, and it's being sold by a third-party seller rather than by Amazon, with stock down to the last handful of boxes. That reads like a discontinued flavour being cleared rather than a normal price.

At that price it's hard to call it good value, because the same Trek flapjack range in other flavours (Salted Caramel and Peanut Butter, among others) is sold by Amazon itself at roughly a third of the cost per bar. If you specifically want Cocoa Oat, this is currently the way to get it. If you mainly want a Trek flapjack, another flavour will do the same job for a lot less.

For more options, see our roundup of the best vegan protein bars in the UK, and more shakes, bars and snacks in our nutrition section.

Check price on Amazon