Meska Sweets Offers a Taste of Morocco
By Lorrie Baumann
There was a time before the pandemic when the only places you were likely to encounter the Moroccan-style macarons made by Meska Sweets was in a fine New York restaurant or in the gift basket you received when you checked into your luxury suite at one of the city’s finer hotels. COVID-19 has changed that, and Meska Sweets is ready to see its cookies on the shelves of specialty grocers.
Meska Sweets entered the American market in 2016 with a line of hand-made, almond-rich, Moroccan-style macarons that were offered in the foodservice channel.
The cookies were adopted by upscale chefs for their white tablecloth restaurants. In December, 2018, Florence Fabricant pointed out in the New York Times that Meska Sweets’ cookie line included classics like crescent-shaped cornes de gazelle and honey-sesame chebakia that were traditional Moroccan teatime treats, although Meska was also innovating them with flavors like matcha designed to keep up with trends sweeping the American food culture. “It’s our grandmother’s recipe that we’ve upgraded to fit within the American taste,” said General Manager Mehdi Menouar. Meska’s Orange Blossom and Almond Macaron won the award for the best cookie at Kosherfest 2018.
When the pandemic arrived in the U.S. in 2020, Meska Sweets’ foodservice-centered business felt the tremors along with New York’s restaurant and hospitality industry, and Menouar took some time to think about how he could introduce his cookies into the retail channel.
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Grocers had already told him that the short shelf life of his macarons was an obstacle to that, so he had to figure out a way to lengthen the shelf life of his offerings without damaging the qualities that had made them so valuable in the foodservice market – they had to remain an American-influenced interpretation of their Moroccan heritage, and they had to remain all natural, with no preservatives or artificial colors. Menouar traveled home to Morocco to consult with bakers there about how to do that, and he came back to the United States with a new product line of Moroccan cookies that could be hand-made in a Casablanca bakery approved by the American Food and Drug Administration in quantities that could be scaled to support a national launch into the American retail market.
Like the foodservice line, Meska Sweets’ new retail line of cookies is all natural, with no colorants, and has a 12-month shelf life with no preservatives. “We’re sticking to all of those things,” Menouar said. “We’re super-excited about it. We’ve always had this issue of shelf life. Grocers will be much happier with the longer shelf life.”
Five flavors are offered for retail shelves: three sweet varieties and two that are savory and beg to be paired with cheese. “You don’t get to see a lot of savory biscuits on the shelves,” Menouar said. “What’s really cool about the Moroccan gastronomy that most people don’t appreciate is that we’re at the intersection of African and Mediterranean food. The Spanish and the French colonized Morocco at one time, so the food represents a fusion of traditions. You have this complete mixture of ingredients and spices, a true melting pot of aromas and tastes, and what we’re trying to do is build on that with our cookies and biscuits, and, hopefully, folks will like them.”
Savory Oregano Moroccan Bites, flavored with mustard as well as oregano and a touch of pepper, and Savory Paprika Moroccan Bites, with mustard and chile pepper as well as the paprika, are the two savory flavors. The sweet varieties include Sweet Ginger and Almond & Raisins Moroccan Bites and a third called Palmier Bites that’s a bite-size twist on a French-style Elephant ears pastry, rich with butter and deliciously sweet. All of them are bite-size nibbles – each a little smaller than a tea cookie, so that a 5.3-ounce box contains about 50. The cookies are sealed into an inner foil pouch inside the box to help maintain their freshness, and a box retails for $4.99.
Ethel’s Baking Company: Gluten Free and Decadently Delicious Dessert Bars
By Lorrie Baumann
Even an accomplished baker has days when the only feasible option for a fresh-baked treat is a quick stop at the market. A baker with a family member who has celiac disease doesn’t always have that option, according to Jill Bommarito, who comes from a family with a 40-year long history of celiac disease, an autoimmune disease in which the body responds to gluten by damaging the digestive system.
Bommarito doesn’t have celiac disease herself, but she does follow a gluten-free diet that many others in her family require, and over the years, she’d become a proficient home baker. “I couldn’t walk into a bakery and find something that was of a quality level that I could make at home,” she said. “You could do that with cheese, in every department except bakery…. You can find the meats and the amazing yogurts and the Italian aged vinegars. You just can’t find that in bakery – ridiculous flavor that you can put on a plate and no one would know you didn’t bake it yourself…. I like to bake, but I don’t want to bake every single thing in my life forever.”
That quality concern is even more serious for someone whose health depends on avoiding gluten, since local bakeries often don’t have the ability to offer products that are made in a dedicated gluten free facility that can guarantee that there’s no cross-contamination by gluten, Bommarito added. She responded to the conundrum by founding Ethel’s Baking Co., the company she named after the grandmother who taught her to bake and who also gave her the confidence to know she could do whatever she wanted if she really set her mind to it.
The company was born out of a holiday party she hosted for her entire family. At the time, she was pursuing a thriving career in residential real estate, so her time for baking was limited, but for her party, she baked her Pecan Dandy dessert bars so her family members who couldn’t tolerate gluten would have a dessert they could enjoy. “I had a holiday party for my whole family, who liked to gripe about gluten-free food,” she said. “But the conventional eaters were gorging on the Pecan Dandies.”
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That observation brought to the surface a feeling she’d been having for some time – that even though she’d just come off a record year in real estate sales, that wasn’t what she was really supposed to be doing. “I felt deep down that I was supposed to be doing something that brought joy to people. I knew it was going to be food,” she said.
She started Ethel’s Baking Co. in a church kitchen in Detroit, Michigan, and started selling her gluten-free baked goods at farmers markets and then at Detroit’s Eastern Market. From there, she expanded to the rest of the Midwest through Whole Foods. In those early days, her product range included cupcakes and cookies as well as the dessert bars that included the original Pecan Dandy, but over time, she refined that down to the dessert bars, although she recently added small batches of chocolate chip cookies back in. The line of dessert bars now includes Cinnamon Crumble, which tastes and smells like an old-fashioned cinnamon roll; Raspberry Crumble, which has a shortbread crust and tastes like a fresh raspberry pastry; Blondie, which has the indulgence of a brownie along with buttery flavor and chocolate chips; Turtle Dandy, which offers crushed pecans and chocolate layered over toasted pecans and caramel and a shortbread crust; and Brownie, a fudgy treat made with butter and premium chocolate, along with the original Pecan Dandy, which is reminiscent of a pecan pie, with handmade caramel and whole pecans over a buttery shortbread crust. Raspberry Crumble is the newest of the flavors, while the original Pecan Dandy is still a best seller, along with Turtle Dandy and Brownie. They’re all gluten free, and they’re handmade in small batches with each layer baked separately. Ingredient lists are transparent and clean, so that those who have food sensitivities can be sure that the treats are safe for them to consume. “We won’t compromise on the flavor to try and hit a price target,” Bommarito said. “Now more than ever we’re looking for solutions for how to take care of our family.”
Bommarito says she didn’t start her gluten-free bakery because she thought it was a great way to make money, so she’s particularly grateful for the insights she’s gained from her advisory board and from 10,000 Small Businesses Detroit, a Goldman Sachs educational program that provides participants with practical skills to grow their businesses. That support has helped her provide medical benefits for her business’ 18 employees and move her business into a new 20,000 square-foot facility in metro Detroit that will allow her to scale up her business to meet a growing demand. She says the hardest part of all that has been learning to focus every single day on her financials and to figure out how to increase efficiencies and decrease costs while maintaining product quality. “I work every day to stay focused on what our mission is and not anyone else’s…. I learned that regardless of the passion and how great the product is, financials are the backbone of your company,” she said. “I haven’t looked back for one second – this is where I belong.”
A three-pack of Ethel’s Baking Co. Dessert Bars packaged in a plastic cup retails for $9.99, while a single-serve package retails for $2.99. Ethel’s Baking Co. products are distributed nationally by KeHE and UNFI, along with Lipari in the Midwest.
Better-for-you Breakfast Cookies from a Minnesota Mom
By Lorrie Baumann
Kakookies is a brand of better-for-you individually packaged cookies that are kind to those whose dietary needs don’t allow for gluten or animal-based products. The brand was invented by a Minnesota mom who developed the cookies eight years ago as a care-package gift for her daughter, a collegiate cyclist. “Cookies – it just seemed like it was the obvious thing for a mom to do, to send cookies, but it needed to be a healthier option,” said Sue Kakuk, the Owner of Kakookies and a two-time finalist in the Pillsbury Bake-Off competition. “I started sending her cookies, oatmeal-based with nuts and seeds, something that was packed with healthier ingredients that would satisfy her hunger.”
The baking started when Kakuk became aware that her daughter’s cycling team was breakfasting on competition days with a stop at a convenience store on their way to a race. She didn’t want her hungry daughter competing on the dubious nourishment provided by the products that were generally available in convenience stores at that time, so she started baking oatmeal cookies that she could offer her daughter as a portable breakfast option. “I didn’t want to be sending them boxes of over-processed snack bars,” she said.
Her daughter started sharing them with the other members of her cycling team, and the cookies became popular. “We started hosting athletic teams, primarily cycling teams,” Kakuk said. “I just called them a breakfast cookie at the time.”
Some of those cyclists declined the cookies because they were following diets that didn’t permit them – some were following a gluten-free regimen, and some were vegans. Kakuk did some research into products that she could buy at the supermarket to offer those who couldn’t eat her cookies, but she didn’t like what she found. “A lot of those diet-specific products didn’t have much nutritional value,” she said.
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She decided to make use of the recipe development skills that had served her so well during her competition in the Pillsbury Bake-Offs to adapt her cookie recipe to meet the needs of her guests who couldn’t eat the original version. “It was never really intended to be a vegan gluten-free cookie – it just turned out that way,” she said. The result is a cookie based on nuts, seeds and oats and shortened with coconut oil. The recipe is based on simple, whole ingredients instead of the protein powder and other highly processed ingredients that are added to many other products targeted at athletes. “It still has that cookie texture, but it’s that nice clean label, better-for-you grab-and-go snack,” Kakuk said. “You’re really getting the nutrition of an energy bar, but you get the deliciousness and the comfort of eating a cookie…. It really does satisfy your hunger and sustain your energy.”
Kakookies are now offered in five flavors. Each individually wrapped cookie offers about 200 calories, and the first ingredient in the label list is gluten-free oats. Boundary Waters Blueberry is nut free – sunflower seeds substitute in that flavor for the nuts that are used in the other recipes – and is a best seller in coffee shops. The flavor was inspired by the trail mixes that Kakuk had prepared to take along on outdoor adventures, starting from the days that she was a summer camp counselor during her teen years and then a student at Western Washington University, which she chose partly because its location offered her the chance to canoe on Puget Sound and hike in the Cascade Mountains. She now satisfies that urge for adventures in the outdoors by canoeing in the Boundary Waters. “I think anybody that travels as an athlete or a busy family – you just want to have a variety of snacks. To be able to eat a cookie and enjoy it and feel good about eating it and having it satisfy your hunger – it just feels good to eat it,” she said.”A lot of families, for whatever reason, need something quick to run out the door – our cookies are basically a bowl of oatmeal, but it’s in a cookie form.”
Each Cashew Blondie cookie offers 5 grams of plant-based protein from oats, cashews and chia seeds. Dark Chocolate Cranberry is the flavor most appropriate to enjoy at the end of the day with a glass of red wine. The newest flavor is Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip – a little bit of a departure for the brand, since Kakuk usually prefers working with slightly less traditional flavors. “But on the other hand, it’s an awesome-tasting cookie,” she said.
None of the varieties contains any flour, eggs or dairy. They’re all certified gluten free and soy free. “Even though it’s allergy-friendly, you’d be surprised,” Kakuk said. “They just taste like an oatmeal cookie that’s full of flavor. When you take out all the processed fillers, you’re able to taste the wonderful, wholesome, all-natural ingredients.”
Kakookies is available nationwide through the company’s website and through regional and national distributors for the foodservice channel. It’s widely sold in college campus stores and dining rooms and in resorts and other hospitality venues. For more information, visit www.kakookies.com.