Nutritionally Dense Cooking Sauces with Global Flavors
By Lorrie Baumann
Mesa de Vida is a line of cooking sauces based on fruits and vegetables that are designed to inject flavor and convenience into meals prepared with the intention of catering to those concerned about maintaining their health. “My goal is to make products that make it easier for people to cook, to get to the table more often, and they don’t have to sacrifice flavor or health for a great meal,” said Kirsten Sandoval, the Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chef behind Mesa de Vida. The line currently has five sauces: Smoky Latin, Creole, Caribbean, Mediterranean and North African. The next sauce to join the line is likely to be one based on an Asian flavor profile, Sandoval said.
She started making sauces while she was working as a personal chef catering to the performance needs of professional athletes. “They needed to be eating healthier foods. My players were like little boys – they didn’t like eating their vegetables,” Sandoval said. But while the athletes didn’t necessarily want to see vegetables on their plates, they still needed the nutrition that vegetables provide, so Sandoval responded by creating flavor bases from fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices that she could add to soups and stews. Her goal was a low-sodium flavor base with no added sugar that she could conveniently add to a wide variety of dishes to create the flavors that clients preferred along with the nutrition that allowed them to perform at their best. Each client had a customized flavor base that matched the flavors he preferred. “I began altering the flavor bases with food profiles from around the world that the athletes recognized as the flavors of their homes,” she said. “If I made them a chili, it had the flavor they were looking for…. They were getting the nutrition they needed, and they weren’t looking at a pile of vegetables.”
After a day of cooking for her high-profile clients, she’d come home to her family and cook dinner for them. It didn’t take her long to figure out that she could use at home the same idea that had served her to manage the nutritional needs and personal tastes of her clients, especially since her children had their own nutritional needs and personal tastes. She tried looking for some of those flavor bases in the spice aisles of her local grocers but found that the spice blends she was seeing there often contained the salt or sugar that she didn’t want to include in her food and realized that other home cooks were faced with the same problem for which she already had a solution – a range of global gourmet recipe starters and cooking sauces that are concentrated flavor bases common in professional kitchens, but made for the home cook.
She launched her business in 2017, while she was still working as a personal chef by selling the sauces online and at small specialty shops. “I would drag my kids around to farmers markets to start getting the word out about them,” she said. “You don’t have to buy every spice under the sun to have a meal with global flavors, and you don’t have to chop a whole basket of fruits and vegetables as well.”
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She notes that each of the sauces in the line can be used to flavor a wide variety of soups, stews and slow-cooker recipes, and each represents a region with a culinary tradition of gathering around the table every day. “I really hope that these sauces can have people here have that same inspiration and help them get to the table every day,” she said.
The Mediterranean sauce is the newest in the line. Its flavor profile is characteristic of Italy and Greece rather than the northern Africa area of the Mediterranean region. “It’s a fantastic base for a simple beef stew. Beef, a jar of sauce, some chickpeas and into the slow cooker,” she said. “It’s a really rich jar, so when you open the jar, it’s like cooking from scratch. It’s like having your personal chef do most of the work for you.”
The next sauce that’s in development is a response to consumer requests for an Asian-inspired sauce that’s free from gluten and is low in sodium, Sandoval said. “From there the sky’s the limit,” she added. “I would love to start developing more obscure regional flavors that people find new and also global hot sauces. I want it to be something that customers can’t find very easily and that also have the health profile they need. That’s the mission going forward.”
Each of the sauces is packaged in a 9-ounce jar that retails for $8.99 on Mesa de Vida’s website at www.mesadevida.com, which also offers additional information.
Holiday Season Hopes for High-End Confectionery
By Lorrie Baumann
The COVID-19 pandemic has vitiated the strategic advance of André’s Confiserie Suisse chocolates from its home base in Kansas City and into the national market, but René and Nancy Bollier are regrouping to dodge around the roadblocks that the pandemic has set in their path. René is the grandson of Master Konditor-Confiseur André Bollier, the André behind the business’ name, while Nancy is the company’s co-Owner and Director of Marketing and Wholesale.
Beginning with André’s Confiserie’s debut appearance at the 2018 Summer Fancy Food Show, the couple has been pursuing a strategy to grow the company’s production of fine chocolates to supply more than the two shops that the company operates in the Kansas City metropolitan area and that had become popular places for local residents to stop in for lunch and perhaps a purchase of pastries and chocolates to take home with them. While René was overseeing production in the André’s flagship 25,000 square-foot facility in Kansas City, Nancy had embarked on a complete re-branding of their product line that the couple introduced at the show.
Their presentation attracted the attention of a Whole Foods buyer who offered them a pilot test in three Kansas City stores. “They really gave us a great opportunity to present ourselves in those stores,” René said. That was followed last year by an expansion into 32 stores in Whole Foods’ Rocky Mountain region. “We got positive feedback from that with a lot of holiday items. All locations showed a lot of positivity to what we do, how we do it, the fact that we focus on quality in both product and on the packaging itself,” René said. “Getting the buyers from the individual stores excited about the brand has encouraged them to talk about the brand, to talk about who we are as a family – a third-generation business – and that has really promoted sales.”
There is much for those local buyers to discuss. André’s Confiserie Suisse was founded by André Bollier and his wife Elspeth, who immigrated to the U.S. from Switzerland along with their five-year-old son Marcel at the urging of André’s brother, who was working in Kansas City as a Swiss watchmaker. André set up shop making Swiss chocolates, but it didn’t take him long to discover that he’d launched himself into a market where there was no understanding or appreciation of Swiss confectionery arts. The couple set up tables and chairs in their shop that attracted luncheon customers in and spent the next 10 years educating, educating, educating.
In 1974, André’s son Marcel and his wife Connie joined the business. André’s daughter Brigitte and her husband Kevin Gravino opened a satellite shop in Overland Park, Kansas in 2002, and René and Nancy joined the family business that same year.
By the time Whole Foods came into the picture, they’d charted a path to placing their products in retail stores they didn’t own themselves, and when the COVID-19 pandemic made itself felt in the U.S., Nancy was already in talks with other retailers. The pandemic, though, created uncertainties with respect to André’s’ work force and supply chain that put those discussions on hold.
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Nancy has recently resumed those conversations with retailers who are seeing an increased demand for chocolate. “We are very focused on product, on customer service. Everything we do is what it takes to get a foothold in those markets,” René said. “Retail stores have become a very important part of our business, although online has been a driver during the pandemic. If you can get the products on the shelves of the stores that are necessary for shoppers to go into on a consistent basis, we have seen great success for that.”
René and Nancy are also thinking about how they might be able to expand their product line to include, not just chocolates, but also some of the other items that the company has been serving in its two Kansas City-area stores. Quiche, for instance, was a great success in Kansas City before the Kansas City stores were subjected to COVID-19 restrictions on their business, and the Bolliers are thinking about developing that for sale through the company’s online store. “This is a long-term pivot, and we need to make sure that we’re positioning ourselves well so that when these situations come around, we have the ability to sustain the business,” René said.
While they’re waiting for the pandemic to ease its grip, they’re also using the time to expand their relationships with the national market, marketing through social media influencers with a reach beyond the Kansas City area. “We can increase our brand awareness so that when we go to retailers they can see that we’ve already had some exposure in their markets,” René said. “That’s really how we’re trying to grow the brand, how we’re trying to position ourselves.”
Product development has also continued, proceeding from plans that had been adopted prior to the advent of the coronavirus. As part of a partnership with Sel des Alpes, the company operating the Bex Salt Mine, the last operating salt mine in Switzerland, André’s Confiserie Suisse recently released its Salt of the Swiss Alps + Dark Chocolate Almonds and Salt of the Swiss Alps + Chocolate Caramels. Andre’s also recently released its Extra Dark 80% Chocolate Almonds, which feature extra dark chocolate combined with fresh-roasted almonds and extend the line for Andre’s Signature Chocolate Almonds, the company’s best-selling product.
Around that, the Bolliers are also preparing for a busy holiday season. “We’re forecasting an exceptional holiday season. We count ourselves very lucky that we have a really loyal following in KC and beyond, and we saw that during Easter, Mothers Day, Valentines Day, and even Fathers Day – usually Fathers Day isn’t that big of a deal for us – we saw exceptional sales, record-breaking sales during those times, which I was not prepared for. I was concerned that, with the amount of job loss that we’re seeing in the U.S., that people weren’t going to purchase luxury items like chocolate, but we saw that people were looking for ways to celebrate others, celebrate themselves, looking for ways to put joy into their own lives as well as others’, and things like high-end chocolate are one way to do that,” René said. “I truly believe that if you produce something that is high-quality, and you have it packaged in a way that makes it look special, people seek that out and are willing to spend a little more on that.”
For more information, visit www.andreschocolates.com.
Olive Oil Producers Employ Blockchain to Verify Authenticity
IBM and olive oil producers Conde de Benalua, a cooperative in Spain made up of more than 2,000 farmers, and Rolar de Cuyo, an olive oil supplier in Argentina, today announced they are using IBM Food Trust on IBM Cloud to trace the lifecycle of their product and provide traceability, authenticity and quality for consumers. They join CHO, a Tunisia-based producer that makes Terra Delyssa brand olive oil, and I Potti de Fratini, a family-run oil mill in Italy, which joined IBM Food Trust earlier in 2020.
Using blockchain technology, these companies from around the world are promoting greater consumer trust in their olive oil and working to create a more efficient and transparent supply chain.
Consumers’ demand for transparency and general distrust have been driven by recent reports of olive oil counterfeits and adulteration. That trend is reflected in a broader context, according to a recent IBM Institute for Business Value study, which found that 73% of consumers will pay a premium for full transparency into the products they buy.
“Our mission is to provide customers quality olive oil so they can enjoy a genuine and healthy product. Rolar de Cuyo’s objective in using blockchain technology is to ensure olive oil packers worldwide trust us and choose us. IBM blockchain technology provides the transparency we need to trace the origin of our products, complying with all quality processes to reach consumers’ tables,” said Guillermo José Albornoz, Rolar de Cuyo Director.
IBM Food Trust uses IBM Blockchain technology and IBM Cloud to close the information gap for customers. By scanning a QR code on each bottle of olive oil, consumers can trace its production from the groves where the olives were grown, to the mills where they were processed into oil, to the stores where it is sold. They can see images of where the olives were picked and pressed and get to know the farmers and workers behind the scenes and even review what criteria was met for the oil in each bottle. For example, the tracing will show whether the olives were processed to the standards required to be labeled extra virgin olive oil.
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“Our Terra Delyssa brand of premium olive oil has seen a spike in demand since bottles of traceable olive oil reached stores shelves earlier this year. Consumers in the US and Canada can now buy Terra Delyssa premium extra virgin olive oil in more than 10,000 grocery stores and online platforms, with more retailers adding Terra Delyssa’s premium, traceable olive oil to their shelves,” said Chris Fowler, Sales Manager at CHO America.
The growing demand in early January helped CHO anticipate a spike in sales due to its new consumer traceability app. Supply chains had ample products on store shelves throughout the pandemic, during which time demand rose 30% due to an increase in consumers cooking at home.
CHO is now working on creating a separate enterprise application for distributors and retailers. This app will provide access to in-depth information about each processing and control stage that a certain lot has passed through, including whether it was first cold-pressed, extra virgin or organic, with analysis from CHO’s International Olive Council-accredited laboratory and third-party auditors.
“Our continuing work with olive oil producers demonstrates the growing momentum around Food Trust and our commitment to strengthening the chain that connects food from farm to table around the world,” said Raj Rao, General Manager, IBM Blockchain Platforms. “There’s a growing desire among consumers to know where their food comes from and an increased business motivation to optimize processes with better supply insights. We’re able to work with olive oil producers and distributors provide a single source of secured and transparent information through IBM Blockchain technology.”
