Most food companies source ingredients by price.
The question is: what is the cheapest ingredient that satisfies the specification? The specification is usually narrow — a certain protein content, a certain moisture level, a certain shelf life. If an ingredient meets the spec, it ships.
A chef thinks differently.
The Culinary Standard
Patter Gersuk trained at Le Cordon Bleu in London and spent years as a specialty sourcer for before founding Patterbar. The sourcing philosophy she brought to the bars is the same one she brought to professional kitchens: the ingredient is the food, and the food is only as good as the ingredient.
This sounds obvious. It is not common practice in commercial food production.
Commercial food production optimizes for consistency, cost, and shelf life. These are legitimate business concerns. But they create pressure to use ingredients that are stable, cheap, and interchangeable — which tends to mean refined, processed, and stripped of the complexity that makes whole food worth eating.
The Medjool Date Question
The first sourcing challenge Patterbar faced was the Medjool date.
Medjool dates are the sweetest, most flavorful variety of date — deep caramel flavor, natural binding properties, and a nutritional profile that makes them a genuinely good base ingredient for an energy bar. They are also, as multiple food manufacturers told Patter when she was developing Patterbar, not suitable for commercial food production.
Too finicky. Too inconsistent. Moisture content varies by harvest. They don't behave predictably in production. Use a more refined date product — date paste, date syrup — and you get consistency.
Patter spent almost a year working out how to use Medjool dates in a commercial bar anyway. Not because it was easy. Because nothing else tastes the same.
This is how a chef thinks about sourcing. The right ingredient is the one that makes the food taste best and serves the eater best — not the one that is easiest to work with at scale.
The Michigan Cherry Decision
When Patterbar was developing the Cherry + Cacao bar, the sourcing requirement was simple: dried tart cherries, with nothing added. No sugar. No cherry juice. No oil. Just cherries, dried the way they should be.
The cheapest source of additive-free dried cherries was Turkey. The carbon footprint of shipping from Turkey was, for a Denver-based company committed to thoughtful sourcing, unacceptable.
The alternative was a cooperative farm in Michigan.
Michigan is one of the world's leading producers of tart cherries. The cooperative model means the farmers who grow the fruit have a stake in the quality of the product. The distance from Michigan to Denver is a fraction of the distance from Turkey.
The Michigan cherries cost more. The decision was straightforward.
The Oregon Blueberry Standard
For the Blueberry + Lemon bar, the specification was the same: no sugar, no juice, no oil. Just blueberries.
The blueberries come from a family-owned farm in Oregon that uses regenerative and sustainable farming practices. They are dried to Patterbar's specifications — a texture and moisture level that works in the bar without requiring any additives to stabilize them.
This required working directly with the farm to develop a drying process. It would have been easier to source from a commodity supplier. It would not have produced the same bar.
The Coconut Butter Problem
For the Coconut + Cashew bar, the obvious ingredient is coconut butter — made by processing whole coconut meat into a paste, preserving the fat, fiber, and flavor of the whole coconut.
Less expensive versions exist. They are typically made from coconut that has been partially defatted, or mixed with added coconut oil, or supplemented with soy-based emulsifiers to achieve a consistent texture.
Patterbar uses organic 100% virgin coconut butter. The difference shows up in flavor — full, rich, and genuinely coconut — in texture, and in nutritional profile. The whole ingredient includes the fiber and micronutrients that refined versions remove.
It costs more. It is the right ingredient.
What This Looks Like in Practice
The sourcing philosophy behind Patterbar adds cost, adds complexity, and occasionally creates supply challenges that a simpler ingredient selection would avoid.
It also produces bars that taste like what they are. Michigan tart cherries taste like Michigan tart cherries. Medjool dates taste like Medjool dates. Oregon blueberries taste like Oregon blueberries.
There is no flavor compound in a laboratory that replicates what a well-sourced whole ingredient does. The "natural flavor" version of blueberry is an approximation of blueberry flavor, engineered to be consistent and stable. The blueberry is blueberry.
A chef knows the difference. It is why chefs spend so much time thinking about where ingredients come from.
Every Patterbar ingredient is sourced with the same standard: real food, from the best available source, treated with as little processing as possible. Ranked #1 by Consumer Reports for Nutrition and Taste (December 2024). Try the Variety Pack →