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GOURMET NEWS NOVEMBER 2018 www.gourmetnews.com News & Notes NEWS & NOTES 5 BRIEFS Thrive Market Signs with KeHE KeHE Distributors LLC will be online natural products grocer Thrive Market's primary strategic distribution partner of natural and organic through 2023. Thrive Market provides carefully curated products to online members, making it easy for consumers to find every category of food, including highly-niche categories like women- owned (companies) and carbon-neutral items. KeHE's supply chain savvy, category insights and world-class assortment will heavily support Thrive Market's on-going, on-trend initiatives. Silver Springs Foods Plans Expanded Horseradish Production Wisconsin-based Silver Spring Foods, the world's largest grower and processor of horseradish, is now planning to exceed 100 million pounds of production over the next year, following three new company executive appointments including Eric Rygg as President; Mark Scholze as Vice President (VP) of Sales; and Aimee Pernsteiner as Chief Financial Officer (CFO). With its new President and additional management team members in place, the company looks to expand its reach in new market segments including marinades and dressings. Silver Spring Foods aims to attract new customers to its award-winning product lines, which includes 2018 gold medals from the World-Wide Mustard Competition in the horseradish category with Silver Spring Beer'n Brat Mustard and in the deli category with Silver Spring Deli-Style Mustard. Report Documents Consumer Confusion About Clean Label Claims A new report from Packaged Facts examines the dynamics of the current organic and clean label landscape, including shifts in consumer usage rates, cross-usage, psychographics and demographics. "Organic and Clean Label Food Consumer in the U.S." analyzes the reasons for and implications of these shifts in the context of future market opportunities for product manufacturers as well as for retail channels (natural/specialty vs. mass/value), including private-label and Internet opportunities. Visit www.packagedfacts.com for more information and purchase options. ReGrained Closes $2.5M Strategic Financing Round Led by Griffith Foods ReGrained,which uses patented technology to transform spent brewery grain into tasty superfoods, announced that it closed out its $2.5 million Series Seed financing. Griffith Foods, the privately held global product development company, led the round with additional participation from Barilla Group's BLU1877, Telluric Foods and many other strategic and crowdsourced investors. The investment will help the company scale up its proprietary processing technology and commercialize its ingredient business. 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 top- pings or syrup and a gold award for Cali- fornia 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 ingre- dients. Sundlie discovered date syrup in a mar- ket 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 walk- ing, 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 mo- lasses 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 sa- vory applica- tions, but it's also great as a condiment." S u n d l i e and her fam- ily 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 ex- hausted, 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 de- cided that if she was going to keep nourishing her taste for date syrup, she was going to have to fig- ure out how to make it herself. That involved searching for a supplier of dates. She quickly discov- ered that not a lot of them were being grown in the U.S., where they were generally grown for use as ingredi- ents. "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 pyr- amids 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 prod- uct to find to bring to the United States be- cause 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 in- clude 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 epi- cureans who enjoy the luxurious com- plexity 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 sub- stitute for refined sugar in baked goods. "Our business has really just ex- ploded. 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. GN Land O'Lakes Inc. Board Chair Pete Kappelman Named 2018 Dairyman of the Year Land O'Lakes, Inc. board Chairman Pete Kappelman was named Dairyman of the Year by this year's World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wisconsin. Kappelman, of Two Rivers, Wisconsin, owns and operates Meadow Brook Dairy and will celebrate 23 years of service on the Land O'Lakes board in early 2019. "There is no recipient more deserving of this honor," said Beth Ford, President and Chief Executive Officer of Land O'Lakes, Inc. "Pete not only works tire- lessly on behalf of Land O'Lakes, but is an unrelenting champion for both dairy farming and the agriculture industry more broadly. His voice, leadership and innovation has led us through the ups- and-downs of a constantly evolving ag landscape and has created a strong and dependable foundation for our future success." GN

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