From The Summer 2005 Issue of Natural Grocery Buyer

Tempting organic snacks make indulgence a little healthier

Lisa Everitt

What constitutes a snack? Is it the occasion, the location, the type of food, the packaging? Does an organic snack have to be virtuous?

To find out, Natural Grocery Buyer visited the Fresh Ideas Organic Marketplace at Natural Products Expo West in March.

The marketplace, held on a sunny California afternoon in a tent outside the Anaheim Convention Center, was teeming with people. More than 1,500 attendees munched on all manner of organic goodies displayed by 99 vendors, from dried persimmons to red wine to chocolate ice cream and flavored milk.

Were they snacking? It sure looked that way, although we found as many opinions about what constitutes a snack as we found snackers.

“A snack is a matter of scale, a matter of degree,” said Karen Hermsen, who was serving tiny hamburgers, about the size of a golf ball, made from Organic Prairie ground beef. Organic Prairie is the meat division of Organic Valley Family of Farms, based in La Farge, Wis.

Snacks come in small sizes. Sun Fresh of Visalia, Calif., offers its Pavich Organic raisins in tiny 1.5-ounce and teeny-tiny half-ounce boxes for backpacks and lunches. Earthbound Farm of San Juan Bautista, Calif., now sells 2-ounce organic apple slices touched with calcium ascorbate to keep them from browning. Five bags—a week’s worth of lunchbox apples—retail for $3.49.

A snack must be in a form that works for the occasion. An energy bar, for example, needs to be able to be opened on the run and eaten one-handed. It must ride in a backpack or the pocket of a bicycle jersey for hours without melting or crumbling.

“A snack is food, as simple as that,” said Kimberley Paley of Portland, Ore.-based Paley Bar. Her husband, chef Vitaly Paley, “got tired of the bars he was eating” on bike rides and formulated four flavors of his own, including a savory bar with tomato, corn, apple and ginger called Paley’s Comet.

Paley Bars are designed to be digestible and easily metabolized during exercise. “You’re going to eat one of these and feel OK and get energy from it,” Paley said.

Pouring Bonterra’s organic Viognier, a mellow white wine, and Syrah, a complex red, James Caudill of Brown Forman Wines in San Rafael, Calif., pondered whether wine could be a snack. “Most people serve wine with a meal, but it could be paired with snacks, like hors d’oeuvres,” he conceded.

Winemaker Nichole Birdsall disagreed. “Is wine a snack? Absolutely,” she said. Not only are pecans a snack, but Diana Daniels of the Missouri Northern Pecan Growers in Nevada, Mo., would like everybody in America to eat a fistful a day. “I’ll be doing something, I’ll forget to eat lunch and grab a handful,” said pecan grower Drew Kimmell. “They tide you over.” Kimmell’s trees—some of which are 300 years old—grew wild and were bearing pecans when George Washington was president. They were recently certified organic but have never been treated with chemicals.

The early Osage Indians snacked on pecans, too. “You can go and dig in [Kimmell’s] groves and find arrowheads,” Daniels said.

Some people snack on whole foods. “Raw nuts and dried fruit,” said Susan Schechter, executive director of The Provender Alliance, a natural products trade association in Lyons, Ore. “Usually I mix up my own gorp. Carrots or cheese … or one of those flavored Organic Valley milks. They’re high in protein, and they fill me up.”

Other people crave the comfort foods of childhood. “An organic chocolate mint cookie, an ice-cold glass of chocolate milk—that’d be a nice little snack,” said Dennis Weaver of Change Your Food, Change Your Life! in Edmonds, Wash.

“A snack is just a little bit of something that happens to satisfy the taste you’re looking for at that particular moment,” said Weaver, who teaches healthy organic eating. “If you make organic, good-food choices, everything contributes something to you.”

You can eat a snack on the run. You can hold it in your hand. A snack doesn’t require utensils, some people said. Some foods were just made to be snacks: a banana, a Minneola tangelo or a hard-boiled egg comes in its own protective, biodegradable, single-serving package.

Is a cup of tea a snack? First, Zhena Muzyka of Zhena’s Gypsy Tea in Ojai, Calif., said no. Then she reconsidered. “It is for me,” she said. “I drink tea instead of eating. I use Silk [soymilk] and either organic agave syrup or raw honey. It’s healthy, it gives me energy and it keeps my weight down.”

Charles Tremewen, product manager at Nature’s Path in Richmond, British Columbia, has been thinking about the issue a lot as the Canadian company formulates new versions of cereals, energy bars and toaster pastries.

All of Nature’s Path’s products could become snacks in the hands of the right person. Almost everyone in the tent had a story about the prodigious snacking habits of teenagers: plates of homemade cookies, boxes of Annie’s Homegrown shells and cheese, entire frozen pizzas, mixing bowl-sized servings of white rice. “Boys, when they come home from school—they eat anything,” Tremewen said. “My mum used to hide stuff.”

Adolescents aside, prevailing wisdom suggests that six small, snack-sized meals may be better for people than three squares. Grazing keeps the metabolism fired up and blood sugar balanced, eliminating between-meal lows and helping regulate mood. “Nutritionists say we should eat small bits [throughout] the day,” Tremewen said, but the rules of the workplace often define what we can eat between meals. A good packaged snack product should feel like a treat, he said, while containing as many healthy ingredients as the manufacturer can put inside it.

61.2% growth for Kashi crackers to $8.9 million in the 52 weeks that ended Feb. 20 Source: Information Resources Inc.

To Nancy Hamren of Nancy’s Yogurt/Springfield Creamery of Eugene, Ore., “A snack is usually something you eat between meals—when it’s too early for lunch, but you’re starving.” For such occasions, “yogurt can be considered a snack. And our 8-ounce cottage cheese is a snack, a nice little snack. It has pretty good protein and no sugar.” Hamren suggests mixing the cottage cheese with some Emerald Valley Kitchen organic salsa and scooping it up with Kettle Foods tortilla chips.

Other snack foods fit into a car cup holder or get carried onto airplanes. “People are trying to fit mealtime into traveling,” Tremewen said.

Added Fred Schilling, founder of Dagoba Organic Chocolate: “I say a standing-up food.”

In fact, Rosie Dunaway, a customer business development rep for Zia Natural Skincare in Berkeley, Calif., has turned her car into a rolling, healthy snack bar. As she travels between stores, Dunaway reaches for juice boxes, nuts, fruit leathers, Clif Bars and packages of Primal Strips, a meat-free jerky.

But NGB found her lingering next to the Dagoba table. “A snack is a scrumptious morsel,” she said. “It’s not a meal, it’s a morsel.”

Sylvia Tawse, owner of the Fresh Ideas Group in Boulder, Colo., agreed as she tried morsels of Dagoba Xocolatl (organic chocolate flavored with chilis, cacao nibs, maca, vanilla and nutmeg) and Roseberry (with raspberry and rose hips).

“Aren’t women supposed to eat two ounces of chocolate a day?” she asked.