Most food brands are built around eating less calories. I built Phoenix Bars for the people who need to eat more.

I'm James. I'm 26. I started Flaming Phoenix at 23, in my third year of an economics degree, after becoming fixated on a question I could not put down. What were people actually eating during humanitarian crises?

The answer, too often, was not enough.

I read everything I could find on calorie-dense nutrition. Field rations, expedition food, the science of what a body can actually process when food is scarce or eating is difficult. I wanted to know what the most calorie-dense, most digestible, most portable, most environmentally resilient food on earth would look like, and whether the answer could feed a person in a crisis better than what was being shipped to them.

I sketched a product. Then I tried to take it to the aid agencies.

That mission hit a wall.

Humanitarian procurement cycles run years long and the relationships are decades old. The bar for nutritional sign-off is higher than I had the resources to clear at 23. None of that is wrong, it is exactly how it should be. But it meant the work I had done was going nowhere as a humanitarian product.

What happened instead changed the company.

The same problem, in three different rooms.

I started telling people about this extremelly nutritionally dense bar I have developed. Friends, runners, an expedition organiser I was introduced to through a mutual contact. Within a few months I had been put in touch with people in three groups I had never thought about.

Ultra-endurance athletes burning 6,000 to 10,000 calories a day and physically unable to eat enough food to keep up.

Expedition teams preparing for environments where food would freeze, melt, crumble, weigh too much, or run out.

And people living with conditions that suppress appetite, where eating a meal felt like climbing a mountain, and the question was not what they wanted to eat, but how to consume enough calories at all.

The requirement turned out to be the same in every group. Maximum calories. Minimum volume. Minimum effort. In a format the body can handle when food is difficult.

The same problem I had been trying to solve for humanitarian crises was sitting in front of me, in three completely different contexts.

150 conversations before a single bar.

I had over 150 of these conversations before we ever made a prototype and every design choice in Phoenix Bars came directly from one of them.

I did not design Phoenix Bars. The people who would use them designed Phoenix Bars. I built what they told me they needed.

Today.

Phoenix Bars launched in April 2024. They only weigh 120 grams. They contain up to 557 calories. They are vegan, gluten-free, and made in the UK by a SALSA-certified manufacturer.

I've hand packed and shipped over 20,000 Phoenix Bars across 19 countries. They've been used at Marathon des Sables, the South Pole, in Himalayan basecamps, and more often than I expected, on ordinary mornings when somebody is trying to get enough calories in and finding it hard.

A very personal company.

This is still a very small company. I pack every order from my home. I read every email and reply to every one of them myself, usually the same day. If anything is wrong with your order, you hear back from me, not from a support inbox.

Where this is going.

The goal is to build the single best specialist product on earth for people who need to maximise their calorie intake when something is making eating difficult. A race. An expedition. An environment. A condition. A moment in life when food is not optional.