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www.kitchenwarenews.com • NOVEMBER 2019 • KITCHENWARE NEWS & HOUSEWARES REVIEW 17 Native Sun Purveys Holistic Wellness Cont. on page 18 Cont. on page 18 Avocado and Cauliflower that Crunch BY LORRIE BAUMANN Native Sun Natural Foods Market, with three locations in Jacksonville, Florida, is striving to be more than a grocer. Chief Executive Officer Aaron Gottlieb is responding to heavy competition among local brick-and-mortar grocery retailers as well as looming competition f rom e- commerce by transforming Native Sun into a wellness center that works with other businesses to lower their health insurance costs and offer their employees extra benefits. "Today, brick and mortar – and retail in general – have changed faster than most retailers can adapt to," Gottlieb said. "While that can be nerve-racking, it creates white space in new areas of wellness to go into." Gottlieb, a graduate of Emory University with a degree in anthropology, was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, and opened his first Native Sun store there in the city's Mandarin neighborhood in 1997. He was already a convert to the idea that nutrition and wellness are intimately related, and he opened his store as Jacksonville's original natural and organic grocer. "Before that, there wasn't organic milk or organic produce," he said. "We believed you could have an organic market." Native Sun now carries no genetically modified products, and products are organic whenever the organic option is available at a non-prohibitive cost. "Otherwise, clean and natural," Gottlieb said. Consumers see the organic produce department as soon as they walk into the store. The next thing they're likely to notice is the signs that confirm the store's local outreach, both for its supply chain and for its relationships with its shopper community. "In addition to that, we have the organic juice bar in the f ront of the store," Gottlieb said. "Smoothies create interest in the department. It makes nice smells. It helps the experience that the consumers are having when they're shopping organic." Further into the store, consumers will find a meat department in which the only beef is grass-fed, although Gottlieb is exploring the availability of non-GMO grain-finished options. The store also carries wild-caught fish as well as farmed fish certified by the Clean Fish Alliance. "It took us a couple of years to find a partner to guarantee that the fish are not poisoning the waters or the people raising BY LORRIE BAUMANN Crazy Monkey Baking's Granola Cookie Crunch comes f rom a mom who had a degree in dietetics and an urgent desire to give her own kids a snack that she could feel conscientious about giving them and that they'd enjoy too. She started with an oatmeal cookie that her kids enjoyed and went to work on the recipe to come up with a product that was a bit more oat and a little less cookie but still delicious. Her kids loved it. Their f riends loved it. "My kids really liked it, and that's the beauty of children – that they'll be honest," said Teresa Humrichouser, that Ashland, Ohio, mom. "We are a chocolate family, so I knew that if I put chocolate in it, there was a pretty good chance they would eat it." It was a bonus that she could take it along in her mom-van, and the kids could nibble on it during their rides without leaving behind a mess of crumbs in the car. "Our lives are so busy, so, as a mom, I can have this in my minivan as I pick the kids up f rom practice," she said. Humrichouser's f riends encouraged her to take her Granola Cookie Crunch to the local farmers market, where, every weekend for two years straight, she sold out. Local grocery retailers saw what was happening, and a few of them approached her and asked her if they could carry her product in their stores after the farmers market season had ended. Humrichouser started looking for a commercial kitchen. She found a 350 square-foot facility that had been vacated by a pizza kitchen. "It was a few minutes f rom our house, and it was a small kitchen that we could move into and get it licensed because it had been used for food service in the past," she said. Three years later, she moved out of the former pizza shop and into a 1,000 square- foot facility. Then in January, 2017, she moved into a 7,500 square-foot bakery, where eight employees make small batch after small batch of her Granola Cookie Crunch in four year-round flavors as well as occasional seasonal flavors. "With this move, it has allowed us to be in a location that suited us for bringing on larger customers," she said. The move has also facilitated supplier audits and food safety planning and documentation to qualify for national distribution to grocers who sell the products in either the granola, healthy snack or cookie sections of their shelves. Crazy Monkey Baking is also certified as a woman-owned business, and Humrichouser offers contract True Salt: Clean, All Natural, Affordable BY LORRIE BAUMANN True Salt is a brand based on the simple idea that the culinary world needed a pure sea salt that would enable high-end chefs and home cooks alike to make the switch f rom mass-market iodized salts to a higher-quality sea salt in a price-neutral way. " We had been looking at a number of opportunities within the ingredients stack – areas that we can disrupt and add value to the ingredients eco-system," said True Salt co-Founder Kelly Egan. " We spend a lot of time keeping it as natural and untouched as possible, and that comes out in the end product." True Salt is harvested in Mexico on the coast of the Sea of Cortez, one of the cleanest water bodies in the world, according to Egan. " What's great about the Sea of Cortez is that it's not really touched by the global water flow. It's phenomenally clear and pure and beautiful, with sun and consistent temperatures that create a wonderful environment for both salt and natural evaporation," he said. There, the company produces a natural, unfiltered, unprocessed sea salt that's separated f rom the sea water by natural solar evaporation. "It creates wonderfully clean and beautifully tasting sea salt," Egan said, adding that top chefs in the southwestern U.S. who've tried it have told him that they still taste the sea, with its brininess without overly heavy salty taste, and the True Salt really acts to bring out the natural flavors. From Mexico, the salt is imported into the U.S. to Phoenix, Arizona, where it's hand-sifted and packed into 1-pound bags for retail sale at around $3.79 and larger bags and buckets for culinar y and hospitality applications. There are currently four products: a fine-grain salt, coarse-grain salt, a kosher grind that's milled to the same size grain as mass- market kosher salts and a cocktail rimming salt that's a mixture of fine and coarse grains. A flake salt is on the way. " We priced competitively, so we're able to switch these chefs and restaurateurs away f rom their iodized salt and enable them to use an all-natural sea salt in their foods and enable them to tell that health story," Egan said. " We are leading demand for the industr y to move to a healthier product." The retail product is currently being sold in Oregon, with distribution into other areas of the Pacific Northwest on the way and nationwide distribution projected for later this year. For more information, visit www.truesaltco.com. KN BY LORRIE BAUMANN Making snacks f rom real food is in the DNA at Hippie Snacks, says Founder Ian Walker, who started the business in the late 2000s with Coconut Chips. " We brought that out before any of the players in the States brought out a coconut chip," he said. "Right f rom the get-go, we liked the idea of making products that were as close to their natural state as possible but were a little more convenient." Hippie Snacks' latest innovations are a family of crispy cracker-type snacks: Cauliflower Crisps in Original and Classic Ranch flavors and Avocado Crisps in Guacamole and Sea Salt flavors. "For eight years, we've been trying to come up with an avocado snack," Walker said. "Nutrient- dense, tasty — people get it." In that quest for a tasty avocado snack, Hippie Snacks' research and development team tried a lot of different approaches, f rom baking slices of avocado to f reeze- drying, but they kept running into barriers created by the natural oiliness of avocados, their tendency to turn brown when the tissue is exposed to air, the f ruit's tendency to turn bitter when it's dried, and when those approaches didn't pan out, the team turned its attention to cauliflower a year or two before cauliflower found itself trending in the market. "We had kind of given up on avocado," Walker said. "We tend to take food that has a long tail [rather than leaping on trends]. Cauliflower took off this year, but it just happened. We just thought it was a great way to create a cracker without flour." As the team was coming up with a way to do that by blending the cauliflower into a base with some starch in it to hold the crisp together, they started wondering if they could maybe lick their avocado problem with the same approach, and they made it work. The resulting Avocado Crisps have avocado as their first ingredient, just as the ingredients label for the Cauliflower Crisps starts out with cauliflower. That's important to Hippie Snacks, Walker said. "Some snack-makers, they want to latch onto a popular trend, kind of fairy-dust their products with whatever the trendy ingredient is," he said. "We're not going to call something an Avocado Crisp if avocado isn't the first ingredient. No tokenism here." Both the Avocado Crisps and Cauliflower Crisps are plant-based, non- GMO and gluten f ree. "All of our products go through Non- GMO Project verification," Walker said. They're offered in 2.5-ounce bags that retail for $4.99 in the U.S. For more information, visit www.hippie- snacks.com. KN Crunchy Granola Goodness in a Portable Snack

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