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Snack Foods

Meat Snacks Made from Grass-fed Beef Born in Virginia

By Lorrie Baumann

1D8A3583_colorLandcrafted Food is a brand that’s about an idea as much as about its products. That idea is that there’s a place in the American market for responsibly raised grass-fed beef and the family farmers and ranchers that produce it.

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The company was started a decade ago by Gary Mitchell, Charlotte Hanes and Brantley Ivey, neighbors in Grayson County, Virginia. The county sits in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Highlands, firmly at the heart of the Appalachian Mountains, and it’s mostly famous for the quality of its bluegrass and old time music. It’s unpretentiously rural, and the people who raise cattle there call themselves farmers rather than ranchers.
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Both Mitchell and Ivey grew up on family farms and wanted to be able to pass that legacy on to their own families. Mitchell’s family has farmed in Grayson County for four generations. Ivey moved to the area about 10 years ago to manage the Hanes farm, and it didn’t take long after he and his wife showed up in the county for them to get together with Mitchell for a conversation about how they were going to wean their cattle operations from the marketplace for commodity beef and generate the revenue that would allow them to give their cattle a qualify life. “The first goal was to raise cattle the way we wanted to and to earn a premium price,” says Mitchell. “Selling into the commodity market, there’s not much motivation for doing it better.”
They went to the nearest folks they could find who might be interested in paying premium prices for quality beef – the white tablecloth chefs in Washington, D.C. Once they’d explained to those chefs how they were raising their cattle – out on pasture year-round, with no hormones or antibiotics — chefs started buying even before the company had its first meat ready for the market. “Restaurants began to tell us they wanted us to be grass-fed, and since we were in the mountains of Virginia, where there’s plenty of grass and no corn, it was a natural fit,” Mitchell says.

1D8A3257_bw“There is no market for grass-fed beef unless you develop it for your product,” adds Ivey. “We developed the market.”

Among the three of them, they own and rent about 3,000 acres, and they began partnering with other local farmers – their friends and neighbors – who saw what they were doing and wanted the premium price that Mitchell, Hanes and Ivey were paying for beef raised to their requirements. Now, they have enough beef available to branch out with a new value-added product that’s shelf-stable so they can sell it on the national market, and the team have just built a processing facility in Independence, Virginia, to make smoked meat sticks. Their Landcrafted Food Smoked Meat Sticks are now available in two flavors, Sweet Smoked and Original Smoked. Each 0.9-ounce stick is packed in a countertop caddy of 20 that’s ready to be merchandised either for individual sale or in the whole box of 20. Each stick has 100 calories, with 3 grams of saturated fat. Because the meat sticks are made from grass-fed beef, they’re lower in saturated fat and cholesterol than most other beef sticks on the market, and they’re also made with less sugar than most processed meat snacks, so they’re particularly Paleo-friendly as well.

Marketing support for the product will include shopper marketing, and a social media campaign is in the planning. The brand will be available on Amazon, and additional retail distribution is in process. For further information, call 276.773.3712, email gary@landcraftedfood.com or visit www.landcraftedfood.com.

Maryland Company Introduces Artisanal Snack Salami

By Robin Mather

Meatcrafters, an artisanal producer of specialty cured meats, debuted its Skinny Salamis at the Summer Fancy Food Show in New York recently. Skinny Salamis are the only lactic-fermented meat snacks on the market, said Mitch Berliner, one of the company’s three founders and self-proclaimed “Chief Sampling Officer.”

“They are cured, uncooked products, made in traditional ways that date back to the Egyptians and early Romans. They are high in protein, low in calories, have no sugar or carbs and are gluten-free. They’re made from antibiotic- and hormone-free meats.”
Skinny Salamis are unique for several reasons, Berliner said.

“We were just at the Sweets and Snacks Expo in Chicago,” Berliner said. “All the other meat snacks we saw were cooked, whether dehydrated like jerky or extruded and cooked like the familiar meat sticks.”

Meatcrafters is among the few companies in the US to have gained USDA approval to produce such products, and the only one in Maryland, Berliner said. “We don’t outsource our production,” Berliner said. “We do everything ourselves, from sourcing the meat from local farmers to grinding our own spices to producing and packaging the salamis.”

Skinny Salamis are designed to be a portable snack that fits easily into a pocket or purse. The snack salamis are available in three flavors: Original Black Angus Beef, Truffle (pork) and Street Cart Schwarma (lamb). Three more flavors will be available later this year: Merguez (lamb), Spicy Argentinean Chorizo (pork) and Casbah (pork), flavored with North African spices. The salamis come four to a package, and suggested retail is $6.79—$7.95.

Berliner said the company trialed its products at farmers markets and were selling more than 300 salamis a week from very early on. “And then a wine distributor tried them and said, ‘If you put this in grown-up packaging, I’ll buy it for distribution.’ So we went to work on grown-up packaging.” The company’s designed-from-the-ground-up packaging recently won awards for its graphic design, Berliner said.
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Chefs visiting the market also liked Meatcrafters’ salamis, and they now appear on menus at restaurants in Maryland and Virginia, including Patrick O’Connell’s much-lauded Inn at Little Washington in Washington, Virginia.

“We like to help local farmers,” Berliner said, noting that they work with local producers of Black Angus beef, heritage breed Duroc pork and all-natural lamb. “In addition to our own products, we make specialty sausages with our farmers’ meats so they can offer their own customers salami made from only their meat. We also make specialty sausages for brew pubs using their beers, and for local vineyards using their wines.”

Meatcrafters has been in business since 2009, producing duck breast prosciutto as well as a variety of specialty salamis. They include Chajari, an Argentinian-style salami flavored with garlic, nutmeg, clove, cinnamon and whole peppercorns; Chorizo de Pamplona, an aged Spanish-style classic with cayenne and Spanish smoked paprika; Chesapeake, seasoned with Maryland crab seasoning; Cacciatore, a traditional Italian hunter’s sausage of Duroc pork flavored with sea salt, pepper and garlic; Truffle Mania and Porcini Salami, two fungi-forward flavors that capture the best of the much-loved ingredients; Cinta, another Duroc pork salami flavored with long pepper, lemon zest and mace; Ararat, a Duroc pork salami seasoned with smoked paprika, fenugreek and the Turkish pepper called urfa biber; a wild fennel pollen Duroc pork sausage called One Wild Fennel; a traditional Spanish salami called Fuet, simply seasoned with salt and pepper to showcase the flavors of the Duroc pork and the lactic fermentation; and Dillio, made with dill pollen, garlic and red wine.

The Landover, Maryland, company, founded in 2009 by Berliner, his wife, Debra Moser, and their friend Stan Feder draws on decades of experience the three share in charcuterie and the food business. Berliner, who’s been in the food business for more than 50 years, started as a food distributor. Moser brings a diverse background in food and business experience. Feder, who’s studied with charcuterie experts in Spain, Italy and the US, has a lifelong passion for salumi.

“We’re Baby Boomers who failed at retirement,” quipped Berliner. “We pulled money out of our retirement funds to start this company, and have never taken loans or investments from anyone else to keep going.”

The founders were inspired to start the company when they realized that “we had visited Italy many times and we didn’t know why there wasn’t more good American salami. So we were an upscale charcuterie and then, a little over three years ago, we thought, ‘why don’t we take our salamis and put them in a meat snack product?’ “

The “failing at retirement” thing seems to be working for the company’s founders. “We just knocked out a wall to expand our space,” Berliner said.

Lunch Boxable Snacks for Millennial Parents

By Lorrie Baumann

The oldest members of the Millennial Generation are now in their mid-30s, which means that a great many of them have become parents who now have school-age children. That simple calculation has the food industry scrambling to provide products that those parents will feel comfortable about packing into their kids’ lunch boxes.

As one example, Creative Snacks Co., which just won a 2017 sofi award best new product in the savory snacks category for its Organic Coconut Snacks with Cranberries, Cashews, Almonds, and Chia Seeds, also offers Baked Almond Clusters in five flavors that include various combinations of dried fruit, nuts and seeds for a snack the company is marketing as “Real Good, Feel Good Snacks.” The Almond Clusters are made in small batches and offer a 28-day shelf life. The 4-ounce bag retails for $3.99. The company is also launching 1-ounce, 2.75-ounce and 3.5-ounce snack packs, so there’s a range of sizes that will work in lunches.

GoodnessKNOWS Snack Squares are a similar product that amps up the sweetness with more fruit and dark chocolate. Four bite-size snack squares are packaged together into a bar-sized pack with a 150 calorie count that retails for about $1.49. There are currently six flavors, with five more scheduled to launch in 2018. The current offering includes top-seller Cranberry & Almond, Strawberry & Peanut and Mixed Berry & Almond, each of them combining fruit, whole nuts and dark chocolate. Next year’s launches will be nut varieties without fruit, which will amp up the protein and lower sugar. The snack squares are non-GMO and gluten free, and they contain no artificial colors, flavors or sweeteners. They’re offered in 12-count singles cartons and 5-count multipacks.

Cheesewich, which is a product with two slices of high-quality cheese from Burnett Dairy sandwiched around a slice of deli meat, is currently offered in four varieties: Cheddar Jack Cheese & Hard Salami, Colby Jack Cheese & Hard Salami, Provolone Cheese & Hard Salami and Pepper Jack Cheese & Hard Salami. They’re packaged in a 2.5-ounce single-serving that’s vacuum sealed for a refrigerated 12-month shelf life. Each offers 14 to 16 grams of protein and is gluten free.CHW_Caddie_Slices

This fall, Cheesewich will launch Bacon N Eggs, a gas-flushed vacuum-sealed package of two hard-cooked eggs and turkey bacon. The packaging offers grocers a 60-day shelf life, and the product will retail for somewhere around $2.59.

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The company also makes Hi I’m Skinny Protein Snacks in a Mesquite BBQ flavor that offers 5 grams of protein in a 140-calorie serving and Hi I’m Skinny Superfood Sticks in a Mean & Green flavor that includes green pea flour, kale powder and spinach powder in a snack that offers 2 grams of protein in a 130-calorie serving.

H&O-blueberry-6ct-boxNature’s Bakery, which markets “Energy for Life’s Great Journeys,” is offering Organic Brownies in twin packs that are packaged as six twin packs per box. Flavors are Double Chocolate, Cool Mint and Salted Caramel. The company also offers several flavors of Oat Bars that combine oats with various fruits or organic honey. These are also packed in boxes of six twin packs and retail for $4.99 per box. All of these feature the USDA Organic seal on the front and top of the package.

One bar of the Honey & Oat bars has 60 calories with 10 from fat and contains 6 grams of sugar. The Organic Brownies, made with stoneground whole wheat flour and organic cane sugar syrup, have about 70 calories per brownie, depending on the flavor, and 6 grams of sugar.

SunRidge Farms, makers of organic and natural foods, has just launched its all natural kids mix at the Sweets & Snacks Show in May. The all natural kids mix combines almonds, peanuts, raisins, apples, milk chocolate, peanut butter cups and milk chocolate rainbow drops for a snack that offers 4 grams of protein per serving and is a good source of minerals with low sodium. There are no trans fats or hydrogenated oils, and the kids mix contains no artificial ingredients. The milk chocolate for the rainbow drops is made with certified Fair Trade Cocoa, and it’s non-GMO. Kids mix is offered in bulk cases for parents to package themselves for those lunch boxes.

Cherry MangoFinally, You Love Fruit Leather has come up with a healthier alternative to mass market fruit leathers with You Love Fruit and You Love Veggies leathers made with 100 percent fruit and vegetables, so they’re gluten free, USDA organic, kosher and non-GMO. The leathers are offered in Mango, Mango Coconut, Apple Cinnamon, Pomberry Acai, Tart Peach, Passion Fruit Punch, Key Lime as well as others, and Carrot & Chia Seed, Spinach & Kale and Spiced Beet Root flavors for the You Love Veggies. They’re packaged in 2-serving bags with 45-50 calories per serving. One-ounce packages retail for about $1.99.