Disclosure: Quest Nutrition provided me two boxes of their new Birthday Cake Quest Bar free of charge. Huge thanks to their team for this gesture, but it did not affect my review. Clearly… 

I get the whole concept of being late to a party, but like… you should probably be on time to your own.

Birthday Cake Quest Bar

The Birthday Cake Quest Bar is FINALLY here, and it’s hard to believe given their rich history.

Quest Nutrition was the leader in this whole “Protein Bars Don’t Have to Taste Like Shit” movement. They got started in 2010 and hit the ground running. GNC awarded them Protein Bar of the Year by 2012. They took home the honors again in 2013 when they rolled out their iconic Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, White Chocolate Raspberry, and Double Chocolate Chunk flavors. 2014 saw Cookies & Cream, which tasted as good as an Oreo. #ChunkPorn wasn’t just a hashtag – it was a phenomenon.

A total of 23 flavors were introduced by 2017, excluding new product lines like Beyond Cereal and Hero Bars. But absent was Birthday Cake, perhaps the most requested flavor. The Birthday Cake food trend has been an impossible-to-stop force ever since Oreo celebrated its 100th birthday with Birthday Cake Oreos in 2012, so what the hell took so long?

We finally got our Birthday Cake Quest Bar, but you might want to hold onto the gift receipt…

This bar is not good. It tastes like a combo of flour, nothing, and erythritol.

Mysteriously absent is sufficient sweetness. Quest has reformulated their bars several times since their peak form, and though they deserve applause for efforts to keep their bars healthy, a lack of sweetness is inexcusable for birthday cake. The first bite is very bland with a slight saltiness that simply doesn’t work.

What’s worse, a strong artificial sweetener flavor emerges. I kept waiting for the birthday cake element to build, but the aftertaste only got worse. No vanilla, no frosting… just sucralose.

Quest bills the Birthday Cake Quest Bar as a coated protein, but this is slightly misleading given how structurally different their coatings were in the Pumpkin Pie and Quest Hero Bars. These bars are soft and chewy through and through, which is actually one of its only strengths.

Look, I’m a Quest fan. I was on automatic subscription to monthly deliveries for nearly two years. I don’t subscribe to the growing (but dissenting) opinion in some social media circles that they don’t make good products anymore – they proved they can still produce top quality with this year’s Mocha Chocolate Chip Quest Bar. But I have to call a spade a spade…

The Birthday Cake Quest Bar is a huge letdown. OhYeah! ONE nailed their Birthday Cake bar. Nitro-Tech did too. Combat Crunch‘s tastes like Froot Loops, but even that tastes more like cake than this. This is like when you realize you forgot someone’s birthday moments before you’re about to see them, so you pick up a shitty tin of cookies on the way. It feels rushed, even if time suggests it wasn’t.

In summary, getting old sucks.

Salty Birthday Cake Rating: 1 out of 10
Erythritol Rating: Too Much out of 10
Overall Rating: 4 out of 10

Nutrition: 180 calories, 21g protein, 25g carbohydrates, 5g fat, <1g sugar, 6g erythritol. 

To see how we ranked the Birthday Cake Quest Bar against all the others, check out the link below:

REVIEW: Ranking Every Single Quest Bar Ever Created. 

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