New BC-made Health Foods Hit Store Shelves
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Image by Smitten kitchen
Foods Alive's All Hail Kale chips are just one of many BC-made health foods making a mark on the food market
BC’s health food entrepreneurs are bearing fruit with new health food products that cater to West Coast vegan, gluten-free and health-conscious diets
It started with Holy Crap, the artisan cereal made on the Sunshine Coast. Owners Corin and Brian Mullins appeared on reality show Dragons' Den in 2010 and asked for an investment in their gluten-free vegan breakfast. After taste tests, the dragons understood that "crap" stood for cranberry-raisins-apple-pie. They invested. The next day, the Sechelt-based health food company sold $1.5 million in Holy Crap online.
Today you can find Holy Crap in 203 retail locations in British Columbia. Holy Crap put BC-made health food on the map. In 2012, BC-made health food is a hot, rapidly-growing local industry that’s turning consumers' heads throughout Canada.
About 400 natural health food companies exist in Canada, 25% of which are in BC. The BC health food industry continues to grow rapidly as local shoppers search for tasty, reliable solutions that are allergen-free, gluten-free, organic and vegan.
Here are four BC health food start-ups ready to pounce on the dining and grocery shopping scene. All of these products will be on display at Grocery Showcase West, the 50th anniversary gathering of the Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers, which takes place at the Vancouver Convention Centre April 22-23.
Try these New BC Health Foods
Foods Alive
The raw food movement has grown on the basis that raw foods have high nutritional value. Dehydrated at 119F, raw food preserves enzymes known to assist in the digestive process. Foods Alive products by raw food gourmet chef Afke Zonderland are vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free and without added sugar. But you wouldn’t know it to taste them.
Afke’s sweet Krumbleez cookies start with sprouted buckwheat and are enhanced with nuts, dates and a choice of ginger-chocolate or cranberries and apples. Her high-protein, chia-hemp Carrot Crisps are a savoury, veggie snack with a spicy cayenne kick. While spinach is for old-school Popeyes, the All Hail Kale chips - marinated, organic leafy greens dehydrated until crunchy - are so easy to down it feels like cheating.
Where to buy Foods Alive.
The Vinegar Lady
Vancouverite Wanda Dixon hatched her business idea in 1998 when she tried her great-grandmother's raspberry vinegar recipe with oysters. After four years of tinkering, she was sure she had it just right. Several high profile chefs agree. Hawksworth’s Chef David Hawksworth, Blue Water’s Frank Pabst and Araxi’s James Walt all rave about her fruit-forward, full-bodied vinegars.
The Vinegar Lady line consists of six fruit vinegars that are currently available from the company site, where you can also find recipes. The Hot Prawn and Pecan Salad is ideal for the May 5 launch of the Vancouver Spot Prawn Festival.
Busch Tea Company
Tea has long been linked to revolutions. Think Boston Tea Party and the US Revolutionary War. Busch Tea Company’s tea revolution, however, is far more relevant for daily life. This Vancouver Island start-up has invented a way to brew loose-leaf rooibos tea - the healthiest tea in the world - in your coffee maker. The result is more colour and more flavour.
Rooibos "red bush" tea is the caffeine-free wonder tea that originates in South Africa. Known for its rich mahogany-crimson colour and anti-oxidants, rooibos is used to relieve nervous tension, allergies and digestive problems. While South African cafes are experimenting with concentrated rooibos, known as red espresso, Busch has found a way to make a healthy brew that can sit on heat all day without losing its appeal.
Four varieties of rooibos are available on the Busch Tea site.
Rocket Foods
Frustrated with being unable to order anything that suited his needs when he would meet friends for coffee, allergy-afflicted Jas Bains conceived of Rocket Foods. So far, Duncan-based Rocket Foods' product line consists of oatmeal cups and pouches in four varieties including Granny’s Apple Pie and Red Berry Blues. Rocket livens up this old-fashioned cupboard staple with cranberries, blueberries, sunflower seeds, apples and spice.
The idea is great-tasting, allergy-friendly snacks. Each product is vegan, gluten-free, sulphite free, preservative free and made without artificial flavours and colours. Rocket Foods aims to be available in cafes, delis and convenience stores as well as local groecry chains.
Orders can be placed on the Rocket Foods site.
I decided to araoppch going vegan as a one day at a time proposition because I had gotten overwhelmed in the past and failed because I did too much, too fast, and with too stringent a set of expectations for myself.New vegans will likely make mistakes or slip up, but like anything else (quitting smoking, losing weight, stopping alcohol, etc), we can't just quit or say, this is too HARD, if we make a small error.No one is perfect. NO ONE is PERFECT. Making a little mistake or eating something you thought was vegan only to find you messed up and ate whey these things are normal. They are not reasons to quit, and they do not make you a bad vegan. They are lessons that you had to learn so that you could avoid them in the future. Nothing more.With this attitude in mind, my family is doing this one day at a time. Each day, I look up recipes for one day's worth of food. I don't spend hours agonizing over a week's menu because that would be very difficult for me. I pick one dinner recipe and plan one lunch. Yes, this means I have to go to the commissary more often, but my visits there are very short and I haven't dealt with anything going bad before I got around to eating it!!Twice this past week, I made two little errors. One was flat-out ignorance. I was eating a vegetable nori roll, and I didn't realize until later that the roll had egg mayonnaise on it. I hadn't tasted it while eating the food and didn't see the ingredient list until later when I took the labels off the package for recycling. The second mistake was a slip of forgetfulness. I reached for something out of habit that was not vegan and got halfway through it before having it dawn on me.So, what do you do? Do you beat yourself up? Do you throw your hands up and decide that it's not worth it? Rationally, you know that neither option is sound but lots of us go back to omni eating when enough of these mistakes pile up to make us feel like failures. Instead, I contend, we should just say to ourselves, Well, now I know and I won't make that mistake again tomorrow. Just judge your progress one day at a time. If you can honestly get to the mindset that we are after compassionate and healthy changes not perfection then you'll enjoy the process so much more. If you dive in after a life of eating meat, dairy, and eggs with the rigid idea that you'll be a bad person if you don't make the transition perfectly I'm sorry but you're either going to fail miserably or make yourself feel miserable.This process has been joyful for us so far. We're having so much fun with it! We're trying new foods and discovering a whole new world of cooking and flavor. If we spent a bunch of time worrying about the imperfection of our eating over the last 9 days, we wouldn't be feeling good, motivated, and celebratory because of all the perfect eating we've done.It's attitude one day at a time.I don't know how it works for other people, but that's how it's working out for us.
What about Boring Porridge? So much more dense and flavorful a cereal. Great in milk, applesauce or yoghurt!
Did you not read the article? Need to be vegan, gluten-free and generally allergen-free. Milk is not vegan. Yoghurt is not vegan. Applesauce may contain allergens.
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