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Alaska Airlines Cooks Up Vegan, Plant-Based Options

Alaska Airlines’ Soy Meets World vegan salad includes roasted broccoli, fresh cucumber slices, scallions, pickled carrots, fried tofu and brown rice served over a bed of crisp romaine and baby lettuce greens, topped with roasted cashews, fried onions and paired with a Tamari Chili-Lime dressing.

This summer, Alaska Airlines guests can veg out on board with more gluten friendly, plant-based and vegan meal options available in all cabins. The new vegan option, “Soy Meets World,” is a vegan salad developed in partnership Evergreens, a West Coast-based company that makes gourmet, freshly chopped salads.

“We’re thrilled to offer our guests more healthy and nutritious choices when they fly with us,” said Todd Traynor-Corey, managing director of guest products. “We built our menu thoughtfully to offer more plant-based, vegan and gluten-free options, which include a range of fresh, bright flavors inspired by the West Coast and ingredients that are authentically healthy by nature such as roasted broccoli, crisp romaine and baby lettuce greens, quinoa, fresh fruit and more.”

Alaska Airlines offers three meal options in First Class, including its Signature Fruit & Cheese on flights as short as 550 miles.

It also offers ample food options in Premium Class and Main Cabin, which include up to four fresh options on flights over 1,100 miles and up to five snack items on flights over 223 miles, such as the Mediterranean Tapas Pack (vegan and gluten-free).

Now through October, guests can enjoy fresh summer flavors that include berries, summer squash, corn, citrus and tomatoes. To see all of our food and beverage offerings, visit alaskaair.com.

Travelers can enjoy fresh ingredients inspired by the West Coast, from snacks to freshly prepared meals, by pre-ordering favorites ahead of a flight using the reservation on the airline’s app or alaskaair.com.

Meal orders can be made starting 14 days before the flight, and up to 20 hours before departure.

Snacks and Picnic packs do not require pre-order and are available on board most flights over two hours. Mileage Plan members can store a method of payment in their Mileage Plan account for touch-free inflight purchases, including food and beverages.

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Cibo Vita CEO Named Entrepreneur of the Year in New Jersey

Emre Imamoglu CEO of Cibo Vita, right, accepts the award for New Jersey Entrepreneur of the Year

Emre Imamoglu, CEO of healthy snack food maker Cibo Vita, was named Entrepreneur of the Year, 2022 New Jersey Regional Award Winner, by Ernst & Young at an awards luncheon last month.

Entrepreneur of the Year is one of the preeminent competitive business awards for entrepreneurs and leaders of high-growth companies. Judging was based on commitment to excellence, category diversification and innovation. Factored in the judging were applicants’ responses to questions such as:

  • Identifying opportunity to innovate and create a better world
  • Demonstrating courage perseverance and resilience to overcoming obstacles
  • Inspiring purpose, vision and taking risks
  • Identifying strategies for a sustainable future

Forty-two companies from New Jersey vied for this coveted award. As New Jersey Award Winner, Imamoglu is entered into the Nationals. National finalists and winners will be announced in November in Palm Springs, Calif., at EY’s Strategic Growth Forum.

Founded in 2009, Cibo Vita began by producing private label healthy snack products that consisted of dried fruit and nut combinations for supermarkets nationwide. Nature’s Garden, the company’s flagship brand, launched in 2011. BeHonest low-carb, low-sugar chocolates, launched in 2021.

The company mission is to continuously create innovative products that promote functionuality, digestive wellness and heart health, as well as offer products that are energy boosting and address a ketogenic diet.

Cibo Vita features more than 2,000 SKUs with various combinations of nuts, seeds, dried fruit, trail mixes and coated pretzels and chocolates. Cibo Vita products are sold in supermarkets, big box, drug chains, health food and convenience stores as well as warehouse clubs nationwide.

The company holds certifications for Keto, RSPO, UTZ, Kosher, Organic, Paleo and Gluten-Free. Its manufacturing, distribution, product development, warehouse facilities and corporate offices are based in Totowa, N.J. Since 2018, Cibo Vita has enjoyed a compound annual growth rate of 25.4 percent.

For updates on the specialty food industry, subscribe to Gourmet News.

Noodles with a Protein-Powered Difference

By Lorrie Baumann

If you had to pick one food that transcends culture and geography, you’d probably have to think about it for a while, but you might very well land on the noodle. Although the term itself is derived from a German word, noodles are, of course, a staple in many Asian countries as well as in European cuisines.

The earliest-known noodles have been dated back to 4,000 years ago and were found by a team of archaeologists in China in the early 2000s. They were made of two kinds of millet that had been ground into flour to make a dough that was then shaped into the noodles. Although they’re much tougher than modern wheat noodles, the same kind of millet noodles are consumed in China today.

Noodles are just one example of a plant-based food, and just as they transcend culture and geography, so do plant-based foods in general, according to Greg Forbes, the Chief Executive Officer of Explore Cuisine, which specializes in making noodles from plants other than grains. “The people embracing plant-based are driven by beliefs important to them other than geography,” he said. “I was brought up in traditional marketing, where everything was segmented. The set of beliefs around plant-based transcends geography.”

The company is driven by the questions of how to deliver plant-based protein as cleanly as possible and by the question of how to deliver variety within the pasta category, Forbes said. Explore Cuisine started down that path because the company’s Founder had a daughter who would eat only pasta with ketchup, and her father was concerned that she wasn’t getting enough protein in her diet. He found tofu noodles in the market, offered them to her in a meal. She noticed right away that these noodles weren’t the wheat flour-based pasta she was used to, but declared that she quite liked them anyway. Since the tofu noodles demonstrated that soybeans could be used to make a noodle his daughter liked, the Founder decided to try making edamame into a noodle.

Explore Cuisine has now been making edamame noodles for more than a decade – the first was made in 2010. Americans had already started becoming concerned about gluten and carbohydrates, so when Explore Cuisine introduced its noodles made from edamame and then chickpeas and pulses like green lentils, the market was ready for them. “It was a trend that was growing, and we provided an answer to that problem – gluten free, lower in carbs and, you know what, a pasta for people who were looking for more protein,” Forbes said. “We responded to a consumer need in the market, but in a relatively unique way.”

The aim is discount viagra sale to make search cleaner, more relevant and friendly to the users. Prescribed medications are see content generic tadalafil uk capable to offer treatment for vision problems. Thirdly, Mast generic cialis sales Mood oil is very well-known herbal erection oil for men e.g. It boosts energy level, lowers blood sugar level. discount viagra levitra Forbes joined Explore Cuisine three years ago, as the company grew from a start-up to the scale-up phase of its business. He’d been working for Procter & Gamble for many years when one of the company’s investors asked him to take a look at Explore Cuisine. “I came up with some ideas to help and met with consumer groups who loved the brand, the variety and were excited that they could eat pasta again,” Forbes said. “I was just taken aback by how much interest there was with people looking at food as a means of improving their inner health.”

He was excited by the natural foods consumers who were passionate about their nutrition and about plant-based protein as an alternative to meat. “Actually, you know what, it’s more about variety, even among meat-eaters,” he said. “We wanted to become something that someone could use to get some variety. Pasta’s a nice ingredient, but if I want something that’s quick and easy to prepare and want something with some protein – we can do a lot with that to make it interesting and different.”

By using edamame, chickpeas or green lentils rather than wheat flour to make its noodles, Explore Cuisine eliminates the gluten but also enhances the protein content of the pasta. “And you add a sauce to it, and it offers you the flexibility to do what you want with it,” Forbes said.

Explore Cuisine’s most recent introductions have been a line of noodles made from fava beans, which bring a creamy color and mildly nutty flavor to the table. “With a sauce on it, people cannot tell the difference between a fava penne and a wheat penne,” Forbes said.

Through the company’s Food to Thrive Foundation, these products like noodles made from mung beans are being developed in an innovation facility built by Explore Cuisine in Thailand. Since opening the new facility last year, the foundation is working with the local rice farmers to train them in organic farming methods and to introduce them to the idea of using mung and fava beans as rotation crops for rice in areas where they needed a new crop to generate cash flow during seasons when they were unable to grow rice as well as to produce nitrogen for their soil so they didn’t have to get the nitrogen from chemical fertilizers. “We take the economic risk away from them to encourage them to try something new,” Forbes said. “Fava and mung beans grow well in the dry season. They require a relatively low quantity of water, so it works as a second crop.”

“We feel very good as a company about the work we’ve done in Thailand,” he added. “We’re very excited about the future.”

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