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.
