Three 2018 sofi Awards for Date Lady

By Lorrie Baumann

Colleen Sundlie was in the United Arab Emirates with her husband and infant son, Henry, and she was experimenting with ideas for taking refined sugar out of her diet when she stumbled, almost literally, over date syrup. Today, Pure Date Syrup and California Date Syrup have won two of the three sofi Awards won this year by Date Lady, the company she founded after her return to the United States, with a silver award for Pure Date Syrup in the category for dessert sauces, dessert toppings or syrup and a gold award for California Date Syrup in the condiment category. The third sofi-winning product was Date Lady’s Coconut Caramel Sauce, which won a bronze award in the category for vegan products. All of the Date Lady products are USDA organic, non-GMO, gluten free and kosher and made without any fillers, preservatives or artificial ingredients.

Sundlie discovered date syrup in a market in the town where she lived with her husband and two-month-old son after they moved to the United Arab Emirates so her husband could take a job teaching there. “I had this little two-month-old baby. He was blond, and we stuck out like sore thumbs. Emirati women would pinch his cheeks – ‘Habibi!’” she said. “We did a lot of walking, which people there don’t do – it’s hot. We would go to the market and people would gather around – ‘Habibi, habibi!’”

The women introduced her to date syrup, which was a common ingredient for them. “Date syrup there has been used for thousands of years,” Sundlie said. “They were telling me in broken English that it would be really good for the baby.”

Sundlie had already been interested in taking refined sugar out of her diet, so she decided to give it a try, thinking that the thick brown syrup looked rather like molasses and could perhaps be used the same way. “I was just blown away by the flavor! It’s a lot more mild than molasses. It’s as sweet as honey, but it has more complexity,” she said. “You can use it more in savory applications, but it’s also great as a condiment.”
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Sundlie and her family enjoyed eating the date syrup on their pancakes and waffles and over their yogurt so much that they brought suitcases of the stuff home with them when they came back to the United States in 2008. After that supply was exhausted, Sundlie found that she couldn’t get more unless she went to obscure Middle Eastern grocery shops, and even then, she was never sure about the quality of what she was getting. She decided that if she was going to keep nourishing her taste for date syrup, she was going to have to figure out how to make it herself. That involved searching for a supplier of dates. She quickly discovered that not a lot of them were being grown in the U.S., where they were generally grown for use as ingredients. “It’s hard to believe now, but dates were not a really popular fruit. People didn’t know what to do with them,” she said. It wasn’t like the Middle East, where dates are such a prized crop that there are boutique shops where there might be 100 different varieties of dates displayed in pyramids at different prices according to the varietals. In order to find enough dates, she went looking for date farms in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. “We had to find an organic producer, which hardly existed at that time,” she said. “All kinds of crazy things happened because it is a hard product to find to bring to the United States because we have such high expectations for our products here.”

Some of the dates used to make Date Lady’s current product line – the date syrup has just one ingredient, and that’s organic dates – are imported from Tunisia, but Sundlie has finally found enough dates from a grower in the Coachella Valley, near Palm Springs, California, to begin making the syrup from California produce.

The product line has expanded to include the sofi Award-winning Coconut Caramel Sauce as well as a Chocolate Spread sweetened only with date syrup and made in their facility in Missouri, where the family moved after returning to the U.S. Date Lady has recently purchased larger machinery to keep up with the demand for the products, which appeal both to the epicureans who enjoy the luxurious complexity of the Date Syrup and to the health-conscious consumers who are using it to replace refined sugars. The Date Syrup can be used in addition to, or instead of, honey or maple syrup and as a substitute for refined sugar in baked goods. “Our business has really just exploded. We’re building the facility up to keep up with demand,” Sundlie said “The Coconut Caramel and Chocolate Spread have been very popular, so we’re looking at adding some more products. We’re keeping very busy – that’s for sure.”

For more information, call 417.414.2282 or email info@ilovedatelady.com.