Revolution Foods – Healthy school lunch is not impossible!

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Hemi Weingarten

A few months ago we were contacted by the team at Revolution Foods. If you haven’t heard of this company, it’s an amazing start-up founded in 2006 by two ambitious Berkeley MBAs who had a vision for school lunches that don’t suck yet still cost the same as the current offering to kids in free/reduced price lunch programs. The idea was to prepare fresh meals, every day, in a central hub and then ship them by trucks to all the schools in a certain radius.

They started in Oakland, California and expanded from there. Today, Revolution Foods serves healthy meals to students in 6 major markets – 120,000 meals every day! Since its founding, the company has served 30 million freshly prepared meals.

But it doesn’t stop there. The team’s goal is to ignite a healthy food revolution by not only providing access to the highest quality meals, but also by engaging directly with students to empower them to make healthier eating decisions for themselves. Each school is assigned a Revolution employee (School Account Manager, or SAM for short) with a nutrition background. Aside from overseeing the lunch program, SAM teaches nutrition classes.

And a few weeks ago, instead of a routine lesson with a whiteboard, the bay area SAM did something really useful – she taught the kids how to read nutrition labels and ingredient lists. And in order to make it fun, she brought in some iPads with the Fooducate app on them. The children had to read product labels on everyday items and try to analyze and decide how healthy they are. After they came to a conclusion, they would scan the products with Fooducate and see if they were correct.

Needless to say, the kids were ecstatic about using a cool gadget like the iPad. Hopefully they learned a thing or two about nutrition.

So here are two ideas for parents and school administrators:

1. If your school is participating in lunch programs, get in touch with Revolution Foods asap!

2. Get kids excited about nutrition by using some technology in the class. Bring in some supermarket products, teach the children how to read their labels, and then have some fun by scanning the barcodes with Fooducate (Android, iPhone, iPod, and iPad).

Original post: http://blog.fooducate.com/2011/11/11/revolution-foods-healthy-school-lunch-is-not-impossible/

The Freedom to Eat in the Matzo Holiday

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Amali Messika

Passover is a very special and diverse Jewish Holiday in terms of its culinary choices. Apart from the spring and festive atmosphere, and the sense of renewal and freedom that accompanies its traditions, it is also a holiday in which we all enjoy big nourishing holiday meals. This is the time when, together with festive dishes, we retrieve from storage the special recipes of foods that we rarely get to eat on a day-to-day basis.

The Passover Seder meal fits well with the ethnic trend that has been gaining momentum in recent years. We are witnessing “back to basics” toward traditional dishes, which is manifested in various ways: growing popularity of ethnic restaurants alongside the launch of ethnic-based products, such as Greek yogurt in Europe and hummus in the U.S., as well as a return to home cooking with the preparation of familiar home meals based on family recipes.

Passover to me is a great opportunity to savor the traditional and ethnic dishes of my family, whose Passover meal combines oriental dishes from our Spanish side, and dishes from our Ashkenazi side. This fascinating combination, that sometimes connects contrasting flavors from two corners of the globe, enables us to enjoy a holiday dinner table full of diverse and interesting recipes in a variety of colors and fragrances.

Among the notable advantages of traditional family foods, lies not only in their taste but also in their typical nutritional richness. This is credited to the fact that they often contain more ingredients and spices than the foods that we consume in our regular daily meals. While preparing a holiday dinner requires more investment, which is reserved to special festive events such as Passover, the end-result is most certainly worth the effort.

For example, the traditional meat patties with garlic, onions and various green leaves are all extremely rich in antioxidants and beneficial natural substances. A carrot dish cooked with oil and seasoned with cinnamon and nutmeg, increases the availability of vitamins found naturally in carrots. Fish cooked with tomato paste and a variety of hot spices is very rich in anti-inflammatory substances.

Every year, before the matzo holiday, I come across questions designed to estimate the caloric value of various dishes in the Seder meal. But it is important to understand that when it comes to holidays in general, and to Passover in particular, we have an opportunity to consume richer, more nutritious food in which we indulge with pleasure.

So as long as we have the opportunity to consume numerous dishes on the Seder meal, which result mainly from traditional and family recipes, we might as well enjoy this nutritional richness and its related holiday experience, while burning the excess calories in a spring activity.

How do we get ready for Passover

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Michael Kolsky

Hello Everyone,

Passover is almost here, and with it comes the Seder night (Holiday eve). Cleaning and preparations for the Holiday are well underway. When consumers see “Kosher for Passover” products (products that don’t contain flour and were not produced on a flour-covered surface) on the shelf, they can’t imagine the long process these products have undergone. In this post, I will describe to you what technologists and the people in marketing, procurement and production go through until those products are placed on the shelf.

The process begins immediately after Passover, when the sales and marketing people sit together and analyze the Holiday sales, draw conclusions, share new product ideas from their feverish minds (the technologists contribute their views at this point) and write a brief for the next Passover Holiday (which will be celebrated, mind you, 11 months later). The technologists then immediately issue sample orders to the procurement people. The procurement people will then apply pressure on the marketing people and technologists, with the understanding that if we don’t receive orders on time (and that time is the month of August) we won’t be able to provide Kosher for Passover raw materials on time.

Starting production for Passover

So at this point we already have a list of products for sale and a raw materials order that were sent to the supplier. Now begins a saga of discussions with suppliers, both in terms of what they can provide, and in terms of price.

The confectionery plant holds the first production of Kosher for Passover products for export in as early as November. You read it correctly – November! People are still not finished dismantling their Succot booths, when the confectionery plant is already immersed in production for Passover!

It should be said for the production staff that they are very well- trained for the Passover Kashrut procedure, and modify it according to occasional changes in the production lines.

Passover at the confectionery plant

The second production batch of Kosher for Passover products starts at the liquid chocolate plant in December / January (depending on the Jewish calendar).

Main Passover production at the confectionery plant begins in February. All production lines there – pastry, chocolate and chewing gum, undergo special cleaning procedures to make sure they do not contain traces of flour. In short, the entire plant is thrown into activity frenzy to clean surfaces, prepare lines and machinery and make last-minute fine-tuning to production goals, in collaboration with the Kashrut supervisor.

And now everything is ship-shape and ready for the Holiday

So as you can see, the preparations for Passover are quite a complex process, and we make constant efforts to refine it – both technologically and in terms of employee safety, efficiency and shortening the time spans required.

Happy Passover,

Michael

Michael Kolsky

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Michael Kolsky

Age: 48

Marital status: Married+3, plus two granddaughters

Job title at Strauss: Rabbi of the confectionery plant in Nazareth, and Kashrut advisor of the strategic procurement unit

Joined Strauss in 1993.

Curiosity as a Key Driver of Development
and Evolvement

Posted on April 1, 2012 by Assaf Bashan

The R&D unit of our international coffee company was established ten years ago. The unit is situated in our coffee plant that is based in the city of Lod. This provides a good opportunity to shed some light on the journey we have taken over the past decade.

In its early days, the unit’s activities were focused mainly on the transfer of know-how accumulated in Israel over the previous decades to Group plants and companies in Europe and Brazil. We chose to target several fields:

Sensory professionalism in the coffee world – From the understanding that the best way to examine food/coffee products requires high sensory capabilities in the R&D unit, we found that the sensory issue is a defined discipline in the unit, and we invest numerous efforts in building and retaining a panel of professional tasters that support all development and quality activities in the international coffee company.

Developing an analytical lab. As a fast developing field in the world, many advance testing methods are based on analytical devices. In fact, the “electronic nose” at Strauss is gradually replacing tests conducted subjectively by humans, and can even project what the human nose will smell. Such devices enable us to conduct a large number of tests without fearing fatigue or external influences when forming an “opinion” on the tested coffee.

Focusing engineering and technology on finding solutions to improve yields, cut material and energy costs in the plants, and develop new products and packagings.

The fact that all these disciplines are intertwined within one unit increases their synergy and helps develop innovative products and work methods that improve the quality and life-span of our coffee products. These new capabilities enable us to take a more professional look at the competition map in the markets where we operate and provide recommendations to the market managers and technologists.

What else intrigues us? What challenges does the next decade entail?

We are already in the midst of another change, of which the initial tastes (pun intended) are already here. Firstly, we track and utilize the health benefits of various forms of coffee: over the past two years we found ourselves running clinical tests in hospitals in Israel, while also studying extensive scientific materials from around the world. Secondly, it is important for us to enter the single-serving espresso category, which is a big and interesting challenge for all of us. The espresso coffee market is growing dramatically in Israel as well as internationally, and our R&D unit is uniquely positioned at the forefront of knowledge and capabilities to support the business processes that Strauss chooses to conduct in this domain.

In my next posts you will learn more about the ways in which we accumulate knowledge, the advanced tools we use to this end, and the influence of such knowledge on the ongoing conversation we conduct with consumers: from tasting tastes through to market research and consumer-shelved product interfaces.