Meska Sweets Offers a Taste of Morocco
By Lorrie Baumann
There was a time before the pandemic when the only places you were likely to encounter the Moroccan-style macarons made by Meska Sweets was in a fine New York restaurant or in the gift basket you received when you checked into your luxury suite at one of the city’s finer hotels. COVID-19 has changed that, and Meska Sweets is ready to see its cookies on the shelves of specialty grocers.
Meska Sweets entered the American market in 2016 with a line of hand-made, almond-rich, Moroccan-style macarons that were offered in the foodservice channel.
The cookies were adopted by upscale chefs for their white tablecloth restaurants. In December, 2018, Florence Fabricant pointed out in the New York Times that Meska Sweets’ cookie line included classics like crescent-shaped cornes de gazelle and honey-sesame chebakia that were traditional Moroccan teatime treats, although Meska was also innovating them with flavors like matcha designed to keep up with trends sweeping the American food culture. “It’s our grandmother’s recipe that we’ve upgraded to fit within the American taste,” said General Manager Mehdi Menouar. Meska’s Orange Blossom and Almond Macaron won the award for the best cookie at Kosherfest 2018.
When the pandemic arrived in the U.S. in 2020, Meska Sweets’ foodservice-centered business felt the tremors along with New York’s restaurant and hospitality industry, and Menouar took some time to think about how he could introduce his cookies into the retail channel.
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Grocers had already told him that the short shelf life of his macarons was an obstacle to that, so he had to figure out a way to lengthen the shelf life of his offerings without damaging the qualities that had made them so valuable in the foodservice market – they had to remain an American-influenced interpretation of their Moroccan heritage, and they had to remain all natural, with no preservatives or artificial colors. Menouar traveled home to Morocco to consult with bakers there about how to do that, and he came back to the United States with a new product line of Moroccan cookies that could be hand-made in a Casablanca bakery approved by the American Food and Drug Administration in quantities that could be scaled to support a national launch into the American retail market.
Like the foodservice line, Meska Sweets’ new retail line of cookies is all natural, with no colorants, and has a 12-month shelf life with no preservatives. “We’re sticking to all of those things,” Menouar said. “We’re super-excited about it. We’ve always had this issue of shelf life. Grocers will be much happier with the longer shelf life.”
Five flavors are offered for retail shelves: three sweet varieties and two that are savory and beg to be paired with cheese. “You don’t get to see a lot of savory biscuits on the shelves,” Menouar said. “What’s really cool about the Moroccan gastronomy that most people don’t appreciate is that we’re at the intersection of African and Mediterranean food. The Spanish and the French colonized Morocco at one time, so the food represents a fusion of traditions. You have this complete mixture of ingredients and spices, a true melting pot of aromas and tastes, and what we’re trying to do is build on that with our cookies and biscuits, and, hopefully, folks will like them.”
Savory Oregano Moroccan Bites, flavored with mustard as well as oregano and a touch of pepper, and Savory Paprika Moroccan Bites, with mustard and chile pepper as well as the paprika, are the two savory flavors. The sweet varieties include Sweet Ginger and Almond & Raisins Moroccan Bites and a third called Palmier Bites that’s a bite-size twist on a French-style Elephant ears pastry, rich with butter and deliciously sweet. All of them are bite-size nibbles – each a little smaller than a tea cookie, so that a 5.3-ounce box contains about 50. The cookies are sealed into an inner foil pouch inside the box to help maintain their freshness, and a box retails for $4.99.
Nutritionally Dense Cooking Sauces with Global Flavors
By Lorrie Baumann
Mesa de Vida is a line of cooking sauces based on fruits and vegetables that are designed to inject flavor and convenience into meals prepared with the intention of catering to those concerned about maintaining their health. “My goal is to make products that make it easier for people to cook, to get to the table more often, and they don’t have to sacrifice flavor or health for a great meal,” said Kirsten Sandoval, the Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chef behind Mesa de Vida. The line currently has five sauces: Smoky Latin, Creole, Caribbean, Mediterranean and North African. The next sauce to join the line is likely to be one based on an Asian flavor profile, Sandoval said.
She started making sauces while she was working as a personal chef catering to the performance needs of professional athletes. “They needed to be eating healthier foods. My players were like little boys – they didn’t like eating their vegetables,” Sandoval said. But while the athletes didn’t necessarily want to see vegetables on their plates, they still needed the nutrition that vegetables provide, so Sandoval responded by creating flavor bases from fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices that she could add to soups and stews. Her goal was a low-sodium flavor base with no added sugar that she could conveniently add to a wide variety of dishes to create the flavors that clients preferred along with the nutrition that allowed them to perform at their best. Each client had a customized flavor base that matched the flavors he preferred. “I began altering the flavor bases with food profiles from around the world that the athletes recognized as the flavors of their homes,” she said. “If I made them a chili, it had the flavor they were looking for…. They were getting the nutrition they needed, and they weren’t looking at a pile of vegetables.”
After a day of cooking for her high-profile clients, she’d come home to her family and cook dinner for them. It didn’t take her long to figure out that she could use at home the same idea that had served her to manage the nutritional needs and personal tastes of her clients, especially since her children had their own nutritional needs and personal tastes. She tried looking for some of those flavor bases in the spice aisles of her local grocers but found that the spice blends she was seeing there often contained the salt or sugar that she didn’t want to include in her food and realized that other home cooks were faced with the same problem for which she already had a solution – a range of global gourmet recipe starters and cooking sauces that are concentrated flavor bases common in professional kitchens, but made for the home cook.
She launched her business in 2017, while she was still working as a personal chef by selling the sauces online and at small specialty shops. “I would drag my kids around to farmers markets to start getting the word out about them,” she said. “You don’t have to buy every spice under the sun to have a meal with global flavors, and you don’t have to chop a whole basket of fruits and vegetables as well.”
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She notes that each of the sauces in the line can be used to flavor a wide variety of soups, stews and slow-cooker recipes, and each represents a region with a culinary tradition of gathering around the table every day. “I really hope that these sauces can have people here have that same inspiration and help them get to the table every day,” she said.
The Mediterranean sauce is the newest in the line. Its flavor profile is characteristic of Italy and Greece rather than the northern Africa area of the Mediterranean region. “It’s a fantastic base for a simple beef stew. Beef, a jar of sauce, some chickpeas and into the slow cooker,” she said. “It’s a really rich jar, so when you open the jar, it’s like cooking from scratch. It’s like having your personal chef do most of the work for you.”
The next sauce that’s in development is a response to consumer requests for an Asian-inspired sauce that’s free from gluten and is low in sodium, Sandoval said. “From there the sky’s the limit,” she added. “I would love to start developing more obscure regional flavors that people find new and also global hot sauces. I want it to be something that customers can’t find very easily and that also have the health profile they need. That’s the mission going forward.”
Each of the sauces is packaged in a 9-ounce jar that retails for $8.99 on Mesa de Vida’s website at www.mesadevida.com, which also offers additional information.
Holiday Season Hopes for High-End Confectionery
By Lorrie Baumann
The COVID-19 pandemic has vitiated the strategic advance of André’s Confiserie Suisse chocolates from its home base in Kansas City and into the national market, but René and Nancy Bollier are regrouping to dodge around the roadblocks that the pandemic has set in their path. René is the grandson of Master Konditor-Confiseur André Bollier, the André behind the business’ name, while Nancy is the company’s co-Owner and Director of Marketing and Wholesale.
Beginning with André’s Confiserie’s debut appearance at the 2018 Summer Fancy Food Show, the couple has been pursuing a strategy to grow the company’s production of fine chocolates to supply more than the two shops that the company operates in the Kansas City metropolitan area and that had become popular places for local residents to stop in for lunch and perhaps a purchase of pastries and chocolates to take home with them. While René was overseeing production in the André’s flagship 25,000 square-foot facility in Kansas City, Nancy had embarked on a complete re-branding of their product line that the couple introduced at the show.
Their presentation attracted the attention of a Whole Foods buyer who offered them a pilot test in three Kansas City stores. “They really gave us a great opportunity to present ourselves in those stores,” René said. That was followed last year by an expansion into 32 stores in Whole Foods’ Rocky Mountain region. “We got positive feedback from that with a lot of holiday items. All locations showed a lot of positivity to what we do, how we do it, the fact that we focus on quality in both product and on the packaging itself,” René said. “Getting the buyers from the individual stores excited about the brand has encouraged them to talk about the brand, to talk about who we are as a family – a third-generation business – and that has really promoted sales.”
There is much for those local buyers to discuss. André’s Confiserie Suisse was founded by André Bollier and his wife Elspeth, who immigrated to the U.S. from Switzerland along with their five-year-old son Marcel at the urging of André’s brother, who was working in Kansas City as a Swiss watchmaker. André set up shop making Swiss chocolates, but it didn’t take him long to discover that he’d launched himself into a market where there was no understanding or appreciation of Swiss confectionery arts. The couple set up tables and chairs in their shop that attracted luncheon customers in and spent the next 10 years educating, educating, educating.
In 1974, André’s son Marcel and his wife Connie joined the business. André’s daughter Brigitte and her husband Kevin Gravino opened a satellite shop in Overland Park, Kansas in 2002, and René and Nancy joined the family business that same year.
By the time Whole Foods came into the picture, they’d charted a path to placing their products in retail stores they didn’t own themselves, and when the COVID-19 pandemic made itself felt in the U.S., Nancy was already in talks with other retailers. The pandemic, though, created uncertainties with respect to André’s’ work force and supply chain that put those discussions on hold.
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Nancy has recently resumed those conversations with retailers who are seeing an increased demand for chocolate. “We are very focused on product, on customer service. Everything we do is what it takes to get a foothold in those markets,” René said. “Retail stores have become a very important part of our business, although online has been a driver during the pandemic. If you can get the products on the shelves of the stores that are necessary for shoppers to go into on a consistent basis, we have seen great success for that.”
René and Nancy are also thinking about how they might be able to expand their product line to include, not just chocolates, but also some of the other items that the company has been serving in its two Kansas City-area stores. Quiche, for instance, was a great success in Kansas City before the Kansas City stores were subjected to COVID-19 restrictions on their business, and the Bolliers are thinking about developing that for sale through the company’s online store. “This is a long-term pivot, and we need to make sure that we’re positioning ourselves well so that when these situations come around, we have the ability to sustain the business,” René said.
While they’re waiting for the pandemic to ease its grip, they’re also using the time to expand their relationships with the national market, marketing through social media influencers with a reach beyond the Kansas City area. “We can increase our brand awareness so that when we go to retailers they can see that we’ve already had some exposure in their markets,” René said. “That’s really how we’re trying to grow the brand, how we’re trying to position ourselves.”
Product development has also continued, proceeding from plans that had been adopted prior to the advent of the coronavirus. As part of a partnership with Sel des Alpes, the company operating the Bex Salt Mine, the last operating salt mine in Switzerland, André’s Confiserie Suisse recently released its Salt of the Swiss Alps + Dark Chocolate Almonds and Salt of the Swiss Alps + Chocolate Caramels. Andre’s also recently released its Extra Dark 80% Chocolate Almonds, which feature extra dark chocolate combined with fresh-roasted almonds and extend the line for Andre’s Signature Chocolate Almonds, the company’s best-selling product.
Around that, the Bolliers are also preparing for a busy holiday season. “We’re forecasting an exceptional holiday season. We count ourselves very lucky that we have a really loyal following in KC and beyond, and we saw that during Easter, Mothers Day, Valentines Day, and even Fathers Day – usually Fathers Day isn’t that big of a deal for us – we saw exceptional sales, record-breaking sales during those times, which I was not prepared for. I was concerned that, with the amount of job loss that we’re seeing in the U.S., that people weren’t going to purchase luxury items like chocolate, but we saw that people were looking for ways to celebrate others, celebrate themselves, looking for ways to put joy into their own lives as well as others’, and things like high-end chocolate are one way to do that,” René said. “I truly believe that if you produce something that is high-quality, and you have it packaged in a way that makes it look special, people seek that out and are willing to spend a little more on that.”
For more information, visit www.andreschocolates.com.
