505 Southwestern, Famous for Hatch Chile Products, Celebrates 25 Years of Flavor
505 Southwestern, the country’s leading flame roasted green Hatch chile brand, celebrates 25 Years of Flavor this year and is hosting a major event in Albuquerque to celebrate the milestone in the location it was originally founded by local restaurateur and entrepreneur Roy Solomon.The celebration is scheduled for Thursday, Sept. 15 at 6:30 p.m. at Tin Can Alley, on Alameda Boulevard just east of I-25. Tin Can Alley has gained national recognition as an innovative venue featuring locally inspired food, beverages, and entertainment. Santa Fe Brewing is an anchor tenant alongside several other local vendors.
As part of the year-long silver anniversary celebration of the brand, 505SW invited its fans to submit recipes featuring its world famous green chile. The winner of the contest, Southern California resident Merry Graham, is scheduled to be in attendance, and Chef May will share his twist on the winning recipe, Air Fryer Southwestern Salsa Verde Corn and Bacon Rangoons.
The event is open to the public (subject to capacity limitations) and the first 150 people to buy tickets will receive a commemorative gift bag. General admission tickets are $25 and include food from all Tin Can Alley food vendors. Tickets can be purchased through Eventbrite HERE.
Fans who are unable to join for the event can celebrate with 505SW virtually by participating in 25 Years of Flavor contests and virtual events by following 505SW on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.
“For 25 years, 505SW has been committed to creating the highest quality products using the best and most simple ingredients from the Hatch Valley. Now we want to celebrate with the people who have made our success possible,” said Rob Holland, executive chairman of 505SW. “We will be demonstrating our commitment to our fans and communities with a recipe contest featuring incredible prizes, other giveaways, special offers, and charitable giving all year long.”
505SW started in 1997 when Albuquerque resident Solomon began bottling and selling his unique recipes for green chile sauce and salsa. Honoring his local area code to develop the brand, Solomon’s “magic ingredient” was fire-roasted, Hatch chile.
With humble beginnings as a local favorite, the brand has grown today to become the largest nationally distributed jarred green chile sauce brand. 505SW is sold in every U.S. state and internationally. 505SW’s parent company, Flagship Food Group, operates multiple facilities in New Mexico throughout the state and created the 505SW – New Mexico True Scholars program in 2017 to support local New Mexico high school students interested in studying agriculture in college.
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Healthy Living Natural Food Retailer Hailed as Outstanding Vermont Business
Healthy Living, an independent natural foods retailer, was named as the 32nd recipient of the Deane C. Davis Outstanding Business of the Year Award by Vermont Business Magazine and the Vermont Chamber of Commerce.
The award honors sustained growth and “an acute awareness of what makes Vermont unique.”
“Like Davis himself — former [Vermont] governor, president of National Life of Vermont, and environmentalist — each finalist reflects Vermont’s diverse nature and, at the same time, radiates a savvy business sense,” John Boutin, publisher of VermontBiz and co-presenter of the award, said in his publication.
Healthy Living has long embodied the values honored in the award; when Katy Lesser opened the South Burlington store in 1986, she wanted to bring healthy, natural foods to the family table. In the three decades since, the brand has expanded to include locations in Williston and Saratoga, N.Y.
Lesser co-owns Healthy Living with her children, Eli and Nina Lesser-Goldsmith, who serve as CEO and COO, respectively. Together they have created 350 jobs, supported the economies of Vermont and New York, and worked tirelessly to fuel a passion for great food, health and well-being and establishing a sense of place where people gather to shop, eat, and work.
The company gives back to nonprofits quarterly and just this year became one of the first retailers to join the Northeast Organic Family Farm Partnership, encouraging shoppers to buy local and support participating producers.
Healthy Living’s dedicated, expert staff bring ready-to-eat meals, groceries and wellness items to shoppers each day — with everything sold held to the store’s strict ingredient standards.
“This award means so much to us, because it acknowledges our core values and celebrates them,” Lesser said. “Deane C. Davis became governor at age 68, which shows that you really can switch careers and make an impact. That’s what I did as a young mom in the 1980s, and I’m still learning every day.”
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Novel Farms Reveals First Marbled Cultivated Pork Loin
Novel Farms, Inc., a food technology startup based in Berkeley, Calif., has unveiled what it says is the first-ever marbled cultivated pork loin.
Cultivated meat is poised to help relieve the strain on our food system by providing a supply of animal protein while offering human health, environmental, and animal welfare benefitsm, according to the company.
While the vast majority of cultivated meat companies focus on making sausages or burgers, producing meat that mimics conventional meat cuts is currently extremely difficult — only a handful of companies in the world have been able to showcase pork or beef structured prototypes. Novel Farms now joins this select group by creating a cultivated pork loin that displays the marbling and texture of a real muscle cut.
Novel Farms solves the structuring problem by developing a proprietary microbial fermentation approach to produce low-cost, edible, and highly customizable scaffolds. Its tissue development platform gives an important and unique advantage by not only providing the company with the capability to structure meat from any animal species, but also doing it in a very cost-effective way.
While scaffolding biomaterials such as alginate need to undergo costly functionalization to ensure effective cell attachment, their scaffolding process completely bypasses this step, reducing production costs by 99.27 percent and thus accelerating the path to the commercialization of their products at price parity, accoring to the company.
The founder team, Nieves Martinez Marshall and Michelle Lu, met while working as postdoctoral scientists in the Molecular and Cell Biology department at the University of California at Berkeley prior to launching the company in 2020. Their combined experience of over 30 years in research was key in the ideation of an elegant and unique structuring approach for producing cultivated meat, which has been awarded a highly competitive grant from the National Science Foundation through the SmallBusiness Innovation Research (SBIR) Program (phase I) in 2021.
“Our goal is to accelerate the widespread adoption of cultivated meat and its benefits by producing ‘hard-to-resist’ whole muscle cuts,” said Marshall. “Therefore, we need to be able to fulfill consumer demand by delivering cultivated meat with the same fibrous texture and mouthfeel as conventional cuts from an animal.”
Novel Farms has raised $1.4 million in a pre-seed round with participation of Big Idea Ventures Joyance, Social Starts, Sustainable Food Ventures, Good Startup, CULT foods and strategic angel investors.
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