What granola is, and the three forms you’ll meet it in

Granola is a mix of grains, usually rolled oats, with nuts, seeds or dried fruit, bound with a sweetener and some fat and baked until it turns crisp, often in clusters. That baking is what sets it apart from muesli, which is usually a raw mix. Beyond that, recipes vary widely: some use buckwheat or other grains instead of oats, some add chocolate or coconut, some leave out sweeteners that others rely on.

For this guide, granola means what a producer, a shop or a menu calls granola. We don’t include ordinary muesli, cereal bars or home recipes, and we don’t decide for ourselves that a product “counts” when its maker doesn’t call it granola.

Three forms, three kinds of record

The same word covers things you meet in very different ways, and what a source can tell you differs with each. So Granola.cat records them as three forms.

The pack

Most granola reaches people in a bag or a box: a named recipe, a pack size, a label. A pack record can carry the most detail, because a label has to say what is inside. Sa Granola’s Original, CIVIA’s Granola Frutos Secos and Veritas’s own-label Granola de avena sin gluten ecológica are all packs. Even so, a pack record only holds what the label or the product page actually shows. When a nutrition panel doesn’t say whether its figures are per 100 grams or per serving, as on Sa Granola’s and CIVIA’s pages, we show the figures as published and keep them out of comparisons.

The house granola

Some granola is made to be eaten where it is made and isn’t sold at all. Casa Bernat, a guesthouse in Isil, in Lleida province, includes a homemade granola in the breakfast it leaves for staying guests. You can’t buy it, and the house doesn’t publish its ingredients. Its record says exactly that: a granola you can have as a guest, with ingredients, allergens and nutrition unknown.

The served dish

Cafés and restaurants serve granola as part of a dish. At Caravelle, a brunch café in Barcelona, it comes in a bowl with yogurt, strawberry compote and fresh berries. The menu gives allergens for the whole bowl, not for the granola, so the bowl’s list can include more than the granola itself. A dish record keeps the dish and the granola apart, and it never borrows a nutrition panel from a pack.

Who is behind a granola

The name on a pack is the brand. It isn’t always the company that answers for the product, and that company isn’t always the one that makes it. We keep these apart:

• The brand is the name you see. At Sa Granola the brand and the maker are the same small workshop.
• The operator is the business a label or the terms of sale name as responsible. CIVIA’s terms name a company with a different legal name from the brand.
• The producer is whoever actually makes the granola. Veritas’s own-label panels name the business responsible for the label but not who makes the granola, so the producer stays unknown.

Where a brand comes from doesn’t tell you where its oats, nuts or fruit come from. A local name is not evidence of local ingredients, and we only record ingredient origin when a source states it.

Finding it

A record of where to find a granola is a lead, not a promise that it’s on the shelf today. Sa Granola publishes a list of shops that sell its granola, but the list names shops, not recipes, so each shop is a lead for the brand and not for a particular granola. A supermarket chain’s online catalogue doesn’t say what a given branch has in stock either. Delivery is kept apart from places you can visit.

Before you make a trip for a particular recipe or pack size, ask the shop. The methodology page explains how we record sources, evidence and checked dates, and how to tell us when something has changed.