From Tokyo’s konbini chillers to Manhattan’s gold-foil bar wrappers, protein has become the organising principle of global snacking.
Brands once confined to gym bags now sit on supermarket middle shelves, and the cities producing them reveal as much about the trend as the products themselves.
This isn’t a single category. It’s bakery, dairy, savoury snacking, ready-to-cook batters, and confectionery, all reorganising around one nutrient. For food retail buyers, the lesson is in the brands: who is winning shelf space, why, and where they are built.
Highlights
London: The Curators turns pub snacks (pork puffs, cheese crisps, lentil-based chips) into protein-forward alternatives, recently adding a Classic BBQ protein chip to the range.
New York: David Protein, founded by RXBAR’s Peter Rahal, has built a cult following on minimalist gold packaging and a single relentless metric: protein per calorie.
Los Angeles: YouBar’s San Gabriel Valley facility now runs 24/7, manufacturing private-label protein bars, shakes and baked goods for dozens of unnamed major brands.
Tokyo: Meiji’s SAVAS, launched in 1980, is Japan’s longest-running protein brand and the anchor of the konbini protein shelf, from milk-based drinks to bars and yoghurt.
Mumbai: The Whole Truth built a protein bar business on a single rule: every ingredient printed on the front of pack, in full, with no fine print.
London
The Curators
A2D INSIGHT: The Curators’ growth case rests on substitution, not addition. Rather than asking shoppers to add a new protein product to their basket, the brand replaces a crisp packet they were already buying. That’s a far easier sell to a retail buyer than launching a new category.
Founded by friends Max and Ed in 2018, The Curators is a UK-based savoury snack company headquartered in London. The brand’s proposition is straightforward: take the crisps, puffs and biltong of a British pub snack counter and rebuild them around natural protein rather than batter and salt.
The founders identified a gap in the market: most protein snacks were either bland, like shakes, or overly processed, and built their range around natural ingredients and functional nutrition instead. The lentil-based protein chips, including a newly launched Classic BBQ flavour, sit alongside baked Cheddar and Gouda Cheesies and air-dried beef biltong, all positioned against traditional crisps rather than against other protein bars.
Where to go: Wenlock Road, Shoreditch, where Curators of Flavour is headquartered, sits within walking distance of several specialist health food retailers stocking the full range, useful for a single-morning category tour.
New York
David Protein
A2D INSIGHT: David’s bet is that founder pedigree plus radical simplicity beats flavour variety. Buyers should watch for this pattern across categories: brands stripping back claims and SKUs rather than expanding them, then using scarcity and minimalism as the marketing message itself.
Founded in 2023 and headquartered in New York, David Protein develops protein foods built around a high protein-to-calorie ratio, with its flagship bar aimed at supporting muscle gain and fat loss.
What sets David apart from the crowded bar aisle is restraint. Where competitors lean on colourful, energetic packaging, David’s bars arrive in sleek gold wrappers with a serif wordmark and minimal text, a strategy its founder calls anti-marketing. The approach has translated into real commercial pull: the brand sold more than a million dollars’ worth of bars within a week of launch. The company now operates from Manhattan’s Hudson Square and is expanding into adjacent formats, including a protein-dense, low-calorie ice cream built on whey protein isolate, allulose and monk fruit in place of milk and sugar.
Where to go: Hudson Square, home to David’s headquarters, sits a short walk from Chelsea Market, where several better-for-you snack brands maintain stalls and pop-ups, a useful add-on for any New York food retail itinerary.
Los Angeles
YOUBAR
A2D INSIGHT: YouBar’s story is a reminder that the most useful research stop in any food innovation trip is sometimes the supplier nobody has heard of, not the brand on the shelf. Co-manufacturers see category demand months before it shows up in retail data.
YouBar is not a brand shoppers recognise, and that’s the point. Based in the San Gabriel Valley, the company has spent nearly two decades producing snacks for other brands, and protein demand has now pushed it onto a 24/7 production schedule running large industrial machines around the clock.
The company’s roughly 100 products stock the shelves of airports, petrol stations and retailers including Target and Whole Foods, and its co-founder estimates that the vast majority of American consumers have eaten something out of its facilities, even if they could never name it. Revenue jumped 85 percent between 2022 and 2024 as the business pivoted from bars alone into shakes, nut butters, baked goods, muffins, toaster pastries and brownies, all built around protein.
Where to go: the San Gabriel Valley facility itself is not open to the public, but the broader Los Angeles better-for-you scene, including Erewhon’s Fairfax and Calabasas stores, offers a useful proxy for how co-manufactured protein products are merchandised at retail.
Tokyo
Savas
A2D INSIGHT: SAVAS shows that protein doesn’t need a launch moment if it already owns shelf space. Forty-five years of incumbency, plus daily distribution through 55,000 convenience stores, means the brand competes on habit and trust rather than novelty, a different playbook from the challenger brands reshaping the category elsewhere.
Launched by Meiji in 1980 as a soy protein for bodybuilders, SAVAS is Japan’s original protein brand and remains its biggest, predating the global protein boom by four decades. What began as a niche bodybuilding supplement has grown into a full range spanning protein powders, ready-to-drink milk, bars and yoghurt, all under one trusted name.
SAVAS’s real distribution advantage is Japan’s konbini network. Its milk-based protein drinks, available in 15g and 20g formats, sit on the same chiller shelves as the chocolate milk and yoghurt drinks Japanese shoppers already buy daily, at 7-Eleven, FamilyMart and Lawson outlets, making protein intake a habit rather than a deliberate purchase. The brand has also secured Informed Choice anti-doping certification on parts of its range, giving it credibility with competitive athletes alongside its everyday convenience positioning.
Where to go: any branch of 7-Eleven, FamilyMart or Lawson in central Tokyo will stock the SAVAS chiller range, but Meiji’s flagship retail presence in Chuo-ku offers the fullest view of how the brand sits across its protein, dairy and confectionery portfolio.
Mumbai
The Whole Truth
A2D INSIGHT: The Whole Truth’s lesson mirrors David Protein’s in New York but arrives at it from the opposite direction. Where David sells through visual restraint, The Whole Truth sells through maximal disclosure. Both strategies convert distrust of the wider protein category into a competitive advantage, just by working the claim in different directions.
Founded in 2019 by Shashank Mehta and Rachna Aggarwal, The Whole Truth began life as a protein bar brand called And Nothing Else before rebranding the following year. Mehta, a former Hindustan Unilever marketer who had spent years cycling through fad diets and misleading “healthy” labels, built the company around a single non-negotiable rule: every ingredient appears on the front of the pack, in full, in plain language.
That radical transparency became the brand’s defining commercial asset. The Whole Truth has grown from a single double chocolate protein bar produced out of a small rented space in Mumbai’s Saki Naka into a clean-label food company spanning protein bars, protein powder, muesli and nut spreads, now valued at over ₹2,100 crore. Distribution runs through its own website, quick commerce platforms including Blinkit and Zepto, and premium supermarkets across India.
Where to go: Saki Naka, where the brand’s first production space was based, sits within easy reach of Mumbai’s broader better-for-you retail cluster in Bandra and Khar, where The Whole Truth’s products now sit alongside other clean-label Indian challenger brands.
3 Lessons for Food Retail
- Substitution beats addition. The Curators wins by replacing an existing habit, a crisp packet someone was already buying, rather than asking shoppers to adopt something new. SAVAS does the same by riding an existing daily habit: the konbini chiller stop.
- Restraint and transparency are both forms of marketing. David Protein sells through visual minimalism; The Whole Truth sells through maximal ingredient disclosure. Both turn scepticism about the wider protein category into a point of difference.
- The supply chain is the story. YouBar proves that the most commercially useful research stop is sometimes the co-manufacturer behind the brand, not the brand itself.
Looking to explore the brands and cities driving the protein boom? We design bespoke research programs connecting food retail professionals with the founders, factories and retailers shaping snacking’s next phase.
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