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Naturally Healthy GOURMET NEWS NOVEMBER 2019 www.gourmetnews.com NATURALLY HEALTHY 1 5 A Righteous Salty Snack with Crunch At that point, neither of the men had any experience at all in bringing a food product to the retail market – they just knew they were onto something that people like themselves needed and the market wasn't offering. "We started Googling all the ba- sics on how do you legally start producing a packaged food product for sale. That same morning we were brainstorming all of this," Schmidgall said. "One month later, we'd produced 150 packages of this grain- free snack mix." The first sales for the product came through the company's website, but it wasn't long before a manager at Hy-Vee came to them saying the store was getting customer requests for the product, and would they like to put it on shelves? "That was our first experience with supermarkets this little health food division of Hy-Vee," Schmidgall said. "They were just a really great partners for us to sort of grow into and learn the ropes." Shortly after the two started the com- pany, Schmidgall relocated from Iowa to the Boulder, Colorado, area, where he found a community with the infrastructure to support the natural foods indus- try. The company relocated its oper- ations to Loveland, not far outside Boulder, in 2016. Freed from the constraints imposed by the restau- rant kitchen that Menzel had been able to borrow after hours, produc- tion of the snack mix started in earnest. In the five years since Menzel came up with that first snack mix, now known as Bubba's Fine Foods Original Savory Grain Free Snack Mix, the company's product range has grown to in- clude several new flavors of snack mixes and then several flavors of UnGranola. The most recent addition to the range is 'Nana Chips, which is the snack mix without the nuts. Righteous Ranch is one of the most popular flavors of the snack mix. "If you look at the ingredients of a lot of ranch flavors of any- thing, the ingredient deck gets a bit processed. What makes ours righteous is that the ingredient deck is just spices from your kitchen pantry, dairy-free as well for people who have problems with that aller- gen," Schmidgall said. Like all of the company's products, the Righteous Ranch Snack Mix is grain free, gluten free, Paleo, non-GMO and kosher, with no refined sugar, no soy and no dairy. "The big trick that we're pulling off is naughty taste but with super-simple ingre- dients, and it's what sets us apart from al- most all the other salty snack producers," Schmidgall said. The Bubba's Fine Foods Snack Mixes are packed in 4-ounce bags that retail for $4.29. 'Nana Chips packages are 2.7 ounces retailing for $2.99, and UnGranola, recently named the top Paleo gra- nola by the readers of Paleo magazine, is pack- aged in 6-ounce bags that retail for $6.29. The products are dis- tributed nationally, with the greatest density now in Colorado, Texas and Cali- fornia. They're generally sold in the natural channel and in conventional gro- cers with a strong natural foods presence. For more information, visit www .bubbasfoods.com. GN BY LORRIE BAUMANN Bubba's Fine Foods offers a line of snack mixes for customers who love the salt and crunch of the snack foods they grew up eat- ing but who've gone grain-free in adult- hood. Bubba's Fine Foods Grain Free Snack Mixes were invented by gourmet chef Jared Men- zel, who co-founded the company along with Jeff Schmidgall, a former CrossFit trainer and health coach. "We couldn't find salty, crunchy snacks that fit our new diet criteria," Schmidgall said. "If the food had the right ingre- dients, it didn't taste good. If it tasted good, it just had too many ultra-processed ingredients." The two men are brothers-in-law and be- came business partners in 2014 after Men- zel – nicknamed Bubba as a child – showed up at a family vacation with a grain-free snack mix he'd put together so he could nosh without throwing his blood sugar out of whack. "Both of us had started changing our diets toward more whole foods, less processing, less sugar," Schmidgall said. "Jared ended up making this snack mix from banana chips and nuts with nothing but kitchen pantry ingredients, and it tasted great and had the crunch." Provisions also launched mackerel this fall, a more abundant fish caught in Spain that Managing Di- rector of Provisions Bir- git Cameron says helps take pressure off more c o m m o n l y - f i s h e d species like tuna. It'll come in three flavors: Lemon Caper, Gar- lic and Spanish Pa- prika. As the company grows it grew from 90 stores last year to over 1,000 stores this year it will continue expand- ing other lines in addition to fish. Along with new Kernsa- based beers, Cameron said to watch out for spicy mango and grass-fed buffalo meat sticks next year. Fresh buffalo meat is also in the works and like the other products, these will come from sustainable sources. "We're meant to live off the natural environment," Cameron said. "If we're al- ways thinking we need to re-engi- neer that, that's where things break down. Let's go back to the natural way of doing it, and un- derstand the sci- ence that's now really clear, and follow that path." GN BY GREG GONZALES Patagonia Provisions' products won a Good Food Award this year for its Long Root Ale, made with Kernsa, a grain that, unlike an- nual wheat, grows year-round and has roots that penetrate 10 feet into the soil. The company also offers sustainably har- vested seafood products. The mussels come from an organic aquaculture farm, and it offers a sockeye salmon caught using meth- ods like reef nets, which prevents larger fish from getting caught as well. Patagonia Patagonia Provisions Proffers GFA-Awarded Beer, Sustainable Seafood

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