Protein Bars and Fitness Snacks at dm Austria, Tested

I do most of my snack shopping at dm, and not because I planned it that way. There’s one on my way home, and there’s one in almost every Austrian town I’ve stopped in. The shelf has also gotten a lot bigger over the last two years, which sounds like good news until you’re standing there reading the back of eleven different wrappers, trying to work out which one is a good snack and which one is a candy bar wearing a protein costume.

So I read all of them. In June 2025, I went through every protein bar dm Austria stocked, 72 of them, and put the numbers side by side. Since then, I’ve kept eating my way through the rest of the shelf: the rice cakes, the chickpea waffles, the bliss balls, the stuff I throw in a gym bag or a carry-on without thinking. This is the whole list in one place: the protein bars at dm that are actually worth buying, the snacks I keep restocking, and the ones I’ve stopped picking up.

If you’re unsure what to look for when choosing a bar, check out my guide to choosing a healthy protein bar.

How I tested the protein bars at dm

I compared everything per 100g rather than per bar, because bar sizes at dm run from 35g to 65g and comparing them any other way is useless. My targets were roughly 333 to 417 kcal, over 33g protein, 8 to 16g fat, 16 to 41g carbs, under 8g sugar, and over 5.5g fiber.

+This is also exactly why homemade protein bars can be such a great option: you control every single ingredient, from the protein source to the type of sweetener. If you want a simple, no-bake version that actually holds together, check out my guide to healthy homemade protein bars that actually work.

Prices come from dm.at, checked August 2026. dm reprices its own brands fairly often, so treat these as a guide rather than a promise, and note that the protein-per-euro column is the one I’d actually use for deciding.

One disclaimer: I’m not a nutritionist. This is a shelf test by someone who eats a lot of these.

The best protein bars at dm

Five bars made it, and each one wins at something different. None of them is a clean sweep, which tells you most of what you need to know about this shelf.

MaxiNutrition Creamy Core, Hazelnut Nougat

The cleanest label of anything I found at dm. No palm oil, no maltodextrin, no glucose syrup, no artificial flavoring, which puts it in a category of about one. It’s also the fattiest bar on this list, and that’s the point: the fat is what makes it actually fill you up instead of leaving you hungrier than before. I take this one on long travel days and after evening sessions when dinner is still an hour away.

Downside, it eats like a dessert. If you want something that feels like fuel rather than a treat, this isn’t it. One additional note: they have changed the packaging in the meantime.

HEJ Natural Crispy, Crunchy Brownie

Best texture of the five, and that matters more than I expected when I started this. A lot of protein bars have the mouthfeel of a rubber eraser, and you might want to stop eating them after two weeks, no matter how good the macros look. This one is crispy, tastes like actual chocolate, and the protein-to-calorie ratio is solid.

It contains maltitol, which is a sugar alcohol, and if your stomach doesn’t get along with those you’ll find out fast. Fiber is low too.

Sportness Proteinriegel, Caramel Toffee Crisp

60g of protein per 100g, which is the highest number on the shelf by a distance, and dm’s own brand so it’s also one of the cheaper ones. If your only question is how much protein you can get for the money, stop here.

It does have palm oil and it’s a processed bar, no way around that. Fiber is basically zero, so it fills you up for about forty minutes and then it doesn’t. I treat it as a post workout thing rather than a meal replacement, and it’s what’s in my gym bag more often than anything else on this list.

KoRo Vegan Protein Bar, Brownie

The vegan pick, and the one people ask me about most. No refined sugar, a short ingredient list by this shelf’s standards, and real texture instead of the paste consistency a lot of vegan bars end up with. It’s the one I reach for when I want a chocolate thing that isn’t going to leave me flat an hour later.

Worth knowing that dm doesn’t stock the full KoRo range in every store, so this one is the most likely of the five to be missing on any given day.

dmBio Nussriegel, Peanut & Pretzel

Oat based, salty and sweet at the same time, and together with the Sportness, the cheapest of the five. This isn’t a high protein bar in the way the Sportness one is, the balance across protein, fiber, and carbs is more like a proper small snack than a supplement. Which is exactly why I pack it for travel days, where I want energy that lasts rather than a protein number.

If you’ve been disappointed by “healthy” bars that taste like compressed sawdust, start with this one.

Every bar side by side

Protein Bar	Protein per 100g	Sugar	Fiber	Additives avoided	Price	Protein per €
Maxi-Nutrition Creamy Core Hazelnut Nougat	32g	1.5g/bar	–	all five	€ 1.95	7.4g per €
HEJ Natural Crispy Crunchy Brownie	34g	1.6g/bar	0.6g/bar	maltitol present	€ 2.45	6.3g per €
Sportness Proteinriegel Caramel Toffee Crisp	60g	0.5g/bar	0.2g/bar	palm oil present	€ 1.35	20g per €
KoRo Vegan Protein Bar Brownie	24g	0.4g/bar	7.2g/bar	no refined sugar	€ 2.45	5.4g per €
dmBio Nussriegel Peanut & Pretzel	9.7g	8.4g/bar	2.5g/bar	all five	€ 1.35	2.5g per €

Rice cakes and sweet snacks that aren’t a sugar bomb

The sweet end of the dm shelf is where the marketing gets loudest, so this is a short list.

dmBio Reiswaffeln with dark chocolate. Light, crispy, one side coated, and the chocolate is dark enough that it doesn’t taste like a kids’ snack. This is what I eat when I want something sweet after a session but not something heavy. It’s not a protein snack and I don’t pretend it is, it’s a low effort sweet thing with a short ingredient list. Around € 1.95.

dmBio Fruchtkonfekt bliss balls, salted almond. Dates and almonds with a hint of sea salt, which sounds like a health food cliché and then turns out to genuinely work. Two or three of these are a dessert. The whole pack is not a dessert, and I’ve learned that the hard way. Around € 1.95.

dm Fruchtbars. My grab and go option when I’m not thinking about it. Fruit, not much else, no protein claim attached.

One tip that took me embarrassingly long to figure out: the baby food aisle at dm has some of the shortest ingredient lists in the store. Fruit pouches and fruit bars over there are often cleaner than the equivalent thing in the sports section, and cheaper.

Savory snacks for the gym bag

Crunchy is where most snack plans fall apart, because the crunchy options are usually chips. dm has three that aren’t.

dm Kichererbsen Waffeln. Chickpea waffles, plant protein, and they crunch properly without leaving grease on your fingers. Around € 1.45.

dmBio Knabbergebäck Laugen-Knusper. Baked pretzel style bites, simple organic ingredients, salty in the way you actually want on a long drive. Around € 1.95.

dmBio Trail Mix. You can actually nevery go wrong with a pack of nuts and dried cranberries.

For homemade versions of the crunchy savory thing, I’ve got a roasted chickpea method that costs about a third of these per portion, though obviously it needs an oven.

My go-to combos

Individually these are snacks. Paired up they hold you over properly.

Sportness bar plus a coconut water. Straight after training, protein and something to actually drink. This is the one I use most.

Trail mix plus a coffee. Airport routine. dmBio Nuss- und Trockenfrüchtemischung travels better than anything soft, and the fat and salt combination is what stops me buying an overpriced airport sandwich I’ll regret.

Rice cakes plus bliss balls. Sweet craving handled without opening a chocolate bar, and it’s about two thirds the sugar.

Where to find all this, and what’s usually missing

Store size decides everything here. A big dm in a Vienna shopping center carries the full sports nutrition wall plus the whole dmBio range. A small branch in a smaller town will have Sportness, maybe HEJ, and a fraction of the snacks in this post. The KoRo bar and the Sommer olive snacks are the two that go missing most often in my experience.

The dm.at online shop carries more than most branches and it’s worth checking before you make a trip for one specific thing. If you want options dm doesn’t stock at all, ESN and Ahead are the two brands I’d look at online, both with better fiber content than most of the dm shelf.

For the wider question of which bars are worth buying regardless of where you shop, I compared brands outside dm in my best protein bars roundup.

FAQ

Are dm protein bars any good? A few of them, yes. The five above hold up on macros and on ingredients, at least by the standards of what a drugstore stocks. The rest of the shelf is mostly average, with sugar alcohols, palm oil and thin fiber content being the recurring problems. Buying a bar at dm because it says protein on the front will get you a candy bar more often than not.

Which dm protein bar has the most protein? Sportness Proteinriegel, at 60g per 100g. Nothing else at dm comes close, and it’s dm’s own brand, so it’s also one of the cheapest per gram of protein. The tradeoff is palm oil and almost no fiber.

Does dm have vegan protein bars? Yes, though the selection is thinner than the regular one. The KoRo Vegan Protein Bar is the one I’d pick, made without refined sugar and with a shorter ingredient list than most. Availability varies by store more than any other bar in this post, so check dm.at if your branch doesn’t have it.

How much do protein bars cost at dm? Roughly [€ RANGE] per bar depending on brand, with dm’s own Sportness line at the bottom of that range and the imported brands at the top. Per gram of protein, Sportness is the clear winner. [Prices checked MONTH 2026, they move.]

Is the dm sports nutrition range the same in Austria and Germany? Mostly, but not exactly. I shop the Austrian stores, and I’ve had readers tell me a product I recommended wasn’t in their German branch. Assume overlap, check before you make a trip.

Nothing on this list is going to change your training. It’s a shelf, in a drugstore, and the honest ceiling here is convenience that doesn’t wreck your day. What it does do is give you something reasonable to grab when you’re between a session and a train, which for me is most weeks.

If you’re building the rest of your routine around Vienna, my gym day pass guide covers where to actually train.