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.