Shelf-Stable Creamy, Crispy Snack Bars
By Lorrie Baumann
Super Pop Snacks is a brand of snack bars based on nut butters. They’re gluten free, non-GMO and contain no refined sugars along with 10 grams of plant-based protein per bar. “It’s creamy and crunchy, not packed with protein powders. We’re making this snacks to help feed a healthier family and future,” said Melissa Wessely, Founder of Super Pop Snacks.
Wessely founded her company in 2016, while she was working full-time and wanted a convenient snack for her six-year-old daughter. At the time, she was doing some of her family’s grocery shopping at a small health food store next to where she was working, but she wasn’t finding snacks there that offered the taste that her daughter demanded along with the nutrition that she required. She decided to try making her own in her apartment kitchen. “I came across crispy quinoa at Whole Foods and thought I could do something with that,” she said. “I was trying to get my daughter to eat something nutritious, and my neighbors were having the same trouble. So I started making the snack bars for our family and the neighbors.”
You should also consume bananas, blueberries, oranges, almonds and avocados to improving your love life. order levitra The best herbal and natural aphrodisiac supplement generic cialis sales is Musli Strong Capsules. The therapists recommend some useful techniques to have intercourse by male accomplice is called erectile issue or male impotency is caused by unwanted and psychological issues have been found order cialis online appalachianmagazine.com responsible for this sexual disorder. It was the mid-90s when Eastern European Olympic athletes stated that Tribulus Terristris has contributed to several health problem leading cialis online men to poor quality. She developed a nut-butter mixture that kept its cookie dough texture even after being formed into bars and incorporated ingredients like spices, honey or blueberries to make the bars delicious. Super Pop snack bars contain no preservatives. “I taught myself the basics and got a license to make it at home,” she said. “Ours are soft creamy and crispy. They don’t have anything weird in them, like artificial flavors, fiber syrups and sugar alcohols. It’s literally a snack you can give your two-year-old or your grandfather.”
She took the bars around to her health food store and then to another, and they started selling. When she’d outstripped the capacity of her home kitchen, she found a bakery where she could make her bars after hours and then took them to southern California farmers markets. “My husband helped us at the farmers market, my daughter too,” she said. “We did that every Saturday – it was a family event.”
Sales of the bars have since outstripped Wessely’s ability to make the bars on her own, so she found a co-packer to make the bars to her recipe. Her husband, who has a background in graphic design, offered his services to build her a website, and the company launched on Amazon a couple of years ago. The bars have now been offered for sale in more than 300 locations, including juice bars, hotels and coffee shops. The bars are labeled for individual sale at $3.29 to $3.49. Online, Super Pop Snacks offers a box of 12 bars for $34.99.
“I grew up as an athlete, running cross-country and track. I always ate healthy. Using that background as an athlete and my operations background and knowing how to sell works great for starting a business and becoming a woman entrepreneur,” she said. “I have a natural entrepreneurial spirit. I always wanted to do something that was mine and provided a product or service that can help people.”
Ethel’s Baking Company: Gluten Free and Decadently Delicious Dessert Bars
By Lorrie Baumann
Even an accomplished baker has days when the only feasible option for a fresh-baked treat is a quick stop at the market. A baker with a family member who has celiac disease doesn’t always have that option, according to Jill Bommarito, who comes from a family with a 40-year long history of celiac disease, an autoimmune disease in which the body responds to gluten by damaging the digestive system.
Bommarito doesn’t have celiac disease herself, but she does follow a gluten-free diet that many others in her family require, and over the years, she’d become a proficient home baker. “I couldn’t walk into a bakery and find something that was of a quality level that I could make at home,” she said. “You could do that with cheese, in every department except bakery…. You can find the meats and the amazing yogurts and the Italian aged vinegars. You just can’t find that in bakery – ridiculous flavor that you can put on a plate and no one would know you didn’t bake it yourself…. I like to bake, but I don’t want to bake every single thing in my life forever.”
That quality concern is even more serious for someone whose health depends on avoiding gluten, since local bakeries often don’t have the ability to offer products that are made in a dedicated gluten free facility that can guarantee that there’s no cross-contamination by gluten, Bommarito added. She responded to the conundrum by founding Ethel’s Baking Co., the company she named after the grandmother who taught her to bake and who also gave her the confidence to know she could do whatever she wanted if she really set her mind to it.
The company was born out of a holiday party she hosted for her entire family. At the time, she was pursuing a thriving career in residential real estate, so her time for baking was limited, but for her party, she baked her Pecan Dandy dessert bars so her family members who couldn’t tolerate gluten would have a dessert they could enjoy. “I had a holiday party for my whole family, who liked to gripe about gluten-free food,” she said. “But the conventional eaters were gorging on the Pecan Dandies.”
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That observation brought to the surface a feeling she’d been having for some time – that even though she’d just come off a record year in real estate sales, that wasn’t what she was really supposed to be doing. “I felt deep down that I was supposed to be doing something that brought joy to people. I knew it was going to be food,” she said.
She started Ethel’s Baking Co. in a church kitchen in Detroit, Michigan, and started selling her gluten-free baked goods at farmers markets and then at Detroit’s Eastern Market. From there, she expanded to the rest of the Midwest through Whole Foods. In those early days, her product range included cupcakes and cookies as well as the dessert bars that included the original Pecan Dandy, but over time, she refined that down to the dessert bars, although she recently added small batches of chocolate chip cookies back in. The line of dessert bars now includes Cinnamon Crumble, which tastes and smells like an old-fashioned cinnamon roll; Raspberry Crumble, which has a shortbread crust and tastes like a fresh raspberry pastry; Blondie, which has the indulgence of a brownie along with buttery flavor and chocolate chips; Turtle Dandy, which offers crushed pecans and chocolate layered over toasted pecans and caramel and a shortbread crust; and Brownie, a fudgy treat made with butter and premium chocolate, along with the original Pecan Dandy, which is reminiscent of a pecan pie, with handmade caramel and whole pecans over a buttery shortbread crust. Raspberry Crumble is the newest of the flavors, while the original Pecan Dandy is still a best seller, along with Turtle Dandy and Brownie. They’re all gluten free, and they’re handmade in small batches with each layer baked separately. Ingredient lists are transparent and clean, so that those who have food sensitivities can be sure that the treats are safe for them to consume. “We won’t compromise on the flavor to try and hit a price target,” Bommarito said. “Now more than ever we’re looking for solutions for how to take care of our family.”
Bommarito says she didn’t start her gluten-free bakery because she thought it was a great way to make money, so she’s particularly grateful for the insights she’s gained from her advisory board and from 10,000 Small Businesses Detroit, a Goldman Sachs educational program that provides participants with practical skills to grow their businesses. That support has helped her provide medical benefits for her business’ 18 employees and move her business into a new 20,000 square-foot facility in metro Detroit that will allow her to scale up her business to meet a growing demand. She says the hardest part of all that has been learning to focus every single day on her financials and to figure out how to increase efficiencies and decrease costs while maintaining product quality. “I work every day to stay focused on what our mission is and not anyone else’s…. I learned that regardless of the passion and how great the product is, financials are the backbone of your company,” she said. “I haven’t looked back for one second – this is where I belong.”
A three-pack of Ethel’s Baking Co. Dessert Bars packaged in a plastic cup retails for $9.99, while a single-serve package retails for $2.99. Ethel’s Baking Co. products are distributed nationally by KeHE and UNFI, along with Lipari in the Midwest.
Favalicious: Brought to You by Three Wives, a Bean and a Rabbi
By Lorrie Baumann
A Bolivian street vendor introduced Frank Guido to roasted fava beans in 1995. He didn’t know what they were, but he had the munchies, and there was the vendor who had snacks for sale. “These kids sold these in little bags, and I thought it was like a peanut, even though the kids told me it wasn’t a peanut,” he says.
Hunger satisfied, Guido pushed his curiosity about what he’d eaten aside and went on with his day. Then he went on with his days for another 16 years or so without giving the little not-peanuts another thought.
But in 2011 and 2012, he happened to be in Qatar to work on a big project. On the weekends, he played some golf and hung out with other ex-patriots, all the while not giving fava beans any thought at all. Then that changed when his friends’ wives started showing up, one after the other. “My friends, all three of their wives were coming in for weekends on different weekends,” he says. This is where the story starts to sound a little bit like it ought to involve a priest, a rabbi and a minister, only with wives bearing fava beans, but what I tell you three times is true, and each of these three women brought along fava bean snacks on their visits and offered some of them to Guido.
The first wife was British, and she had fava beans that had been fried in a tempura batter to set out on her table as an appetizer. The next weekend, it was the Italian friend’s weekend with his wife, and she brought along a little bag of roasted fava beans seasoned with Parmesan cheese. Guido pulled himself together and asked what this was. She explained to him that it wasn’t a nut, even though it tasted like one – it was a bean. “I really did not know it was fava. I still didn’t have that connection. I found it later on Google,” he says. “The next weekend, my Australian friend’s wife comes over with a retail snack called Happy Snack. She brought a pizza variety.”
Well, there it was – three weekends and three times that fava beans had been offered to him as a snack. Some coincidences are not meant to be ignored, and after he’d looked up fava beans on Google, Guido started asking his other friends if they’d ever heard of them. Turns out they had.
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It dawned on Guido that maybe Americans were the last to know about the little beans that could be roasted until they had the crunch of a corn chip and the flavor of a roasted Brazil nut. “I just knew that there was a void [in the American market],” he says. “I studied the market to see what was going on.”
When he got back to the United States after his project in Qatar had ended, he looked up American friends who encouraged him to design a package for what he’d started calling Favalicious snacks and go into production in a small way. “Somebody let me put it into 150 stores to see what happened,” he says. “It sold.”
Guido’s next step was to find a co-packer who would work with him on small batches in a facility where the product could be kept uncontaminated by common allergens. Then he went to work to obtain third-party certifications. The co-packer already had a rabbi in his facility to help with the kosher certification – You knew there would be a rabbi somewhere in this story, didn’t you? – and Guido found the Snack Safely organization to help him certify as allergen free. One in four Americans has some type of food allergy, and allergies to tree nuts and peanuts are common, so Guido’s gut was telling him that he needed that allergen-free certification even though his friends were telling him that he wasn’t going to need that market segment. “We have a perfect snack that’s a plant protein that’s a nut alternative that looks like a nut, tastes like a nut, but it’s a bean,” he says. “Fava’s really the future.”
His Favalicious snacks are currently offered in three flavors: Salt & Vinegar, Chili & Lime and Wasabi & Ginger as well as Lightly Salted. They’re free from the top eight allergens, gluten free and have no added sugars, trans fat or cholesterol. Inside their packaging, the beans are about the size of a peanut. They’re roasted in expeller-produced high-oleic sunflower oil, and each bean is belted by a strip of the husk that holds the two halves of the bean together. “The aesthetics we get out of that are unbelievable – a little extra crunch and beautiful appearance,” Guido says.
New flavors are currently in development, and Guido expects to have three of them, including the pizza flavor that he loved so much when his Australian friend’s wife let him taste her snack, and Guido expects to bring those to market in 2022. Single-serve packaging and a variety pack are also in development. “We have a host of things that we’re developing. It’s a fantastic product to work with, and we’re having a lot of fun,” Guido says. “It’s new and it’s different.”
For more information, visit www.nutteebean.com.
