Suzanne Vita Palazzo of Grocery Headquarters wrote an article surveying some of the leading food companies with a social mission and mentioned KIND and PeaceWorks as a pioneer "revolutionizing the business model for an ethical brand."
A new site just launched that analyzes food product labels for ingredients that may or may not be good for you. Too many items pose as "healthy" while containing ingredients like high fructose corn syrup which labelwatch exposes here as not healthful.
The site is not perfect yet; it’s search engine is clunky; and it still is missing KIND Fruit & Nut bars, which are the #1 Healthy Snack bar line (in terms of market share growth of entire space over each of the last 3 years, and #3 in overall size already in natural industry, according to SPINS, IRI and Nielsen). But it is a good start.
Thanks to Stacy Perman for a profile about PeaceWorks, KIND, and OneVoice in BusinessWeek yesterday.
I like these quotes from our very own Phil Walotsky on this week’s issue of Food Business News:
"Healthy snacking is very hot," said Phil Walotsky, spokesperson for KIND Fruit + Nut bars, PeaceWorks Holdings, New York. "Where we see a great deal of our growth is adoption by casual consumers who look for a healthy option with emphasis on taste and natural ingredients. We’re finding that nutrition bars are being used less as an activity-specific food — for example, something you only eat after a workout — and more people are adding them as a staple of their diet."
And:
"We also believe consumers will continue to become more educated about the food they purchase, and will reward companies that produce healthy snacks that reflect their more discerning desires, tastes and values," Mr. Walotsky said. "Consumers will continue to look for products that are less processed and foods that don’t contain suspect ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils, and instead turn to foods with integrity that taste great and provide real nutritional value."
Pom Wonderful did something, err, wonderful for the food industry by fighting to uphold the standards of the category in which it leads, pomegranate juice, to the point of successfully suing unscrupulous new entrants who tried to ride on its coattails by marketing lower grade products as if they were the real thing:
"Consumers buy the products to gain the health benefit - if that is not present then there are problems for the category. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should be more active in this area but we all know how under resourced they are. We are trying to protect the integrity of the category." Rob Six, spokesperson for Pom Wonderful
"Purely Juice", a company that claimed to sell purely pomegranate juice that was in fact primarily cane sugar and corn sweetener was ordered to pay $1.5mm to Pom.
The category for healthful snacks where KIND leads gets similarly hurt when consumers are duped into buying "natural" "nutritional" and "energy" bars whose ingredients contain refined sugars like high fructose corn syrup and refined flowers and hydrogenated oils, contributing to the diabetes and obesity epidemics overtaking America. Similar enforcement action should follow for companies - big or small - that manipulate what it means to be "all natural" and "healthful."
Two articles recently posted on PeaceWorks and OneVoice and our efforts…
JEWCY.COM: 
Peace Through Pesto: Daniel Lubetzky Schools Us on Building Bridges and Empowering Moderates, 
by Helen Jupiter, July 11, 2008
and
JERUSALEM POST, Don Quixote comes to Israel, Jul 24, 2008, by Heather Robinson
Today we received some samples of interesting products from Turkey: fruits stuffed with nuts. I thought they were great possible additions to our healthy snacks family - minimally processed, all natural, flavorful, just sun dried. But it was funny (and sad) that in informal focus groups, most consumers were turned off by the look of the dried figs and encrusted walnuts. Ok, dried figs and walnuts may well look like coarse mummy brains as some of my team members were saying.
But it seems like some people are getting too used to over-processed artificially created surfaces that are smooth, brightly bleached and homogenous. It is interesting that, while there is a huge backlash against these overly-processed products, some consumers have almost gotten hypnotized into expecting factory-bland looks, without recognizing the health implications. It is almost as if we are being conditioned to expect the factory look, rather than the natural.
Epicurious, the blog that is an institution among foodies (published by Conde Nast, which also guides Gourmet and Bon Appetit Magazines), ranked KIND as one of the best products they tasted at the 54th Annual Fancy Food Show in NYC. It was the only product in the snack bar category that got such mention. Here is what they said about KIND PLUS, our new line:
Still made with natural ingredients you can actually see and pronounce, these tasty KIND nutrition bars are now enhanced with antioxidants, calcium, protein, and omega-3s. We couldn’t get enough of the tropical Mango Macadamia with calcium and the Cranberry & Almond with antioxidants.
We have grown so distant from nature that we no longer know, or even care, about where things come from, or how they look in their original state.
I was curious about these, so I finally looked it up. Can you guess their origins and natural form?
1) Water Chestnuts
2) Sesame Seeds
3) Oats
4) Cashmere: do you know what it is? Is it a process for treating cotton? Does it come from a plant? Does it come from sheep, or a goat, or a cow or other animal? Is it just the name for combing wool very softly?
5) Figs
6) Vanilla
7) Peanuts
Macadamias
9) Horseradish
10) A Head of Lettuce
First visualize whether you really know the above. Then click below (in "More") for the answers.
[Honor System Reward - anyone in the US who guesses 5 or more right gets one free KIND bar - drop a note to dnixon[AT]peaceworks.net with your address and let Donna know Daniel offered this on his blog - offer valid for up to first 500 people who email her and who actually visited this site before May 31 2008; sorry for limitation but last time we offered a free KIND bar we got 16,000 emails]
Clif Bars is one company in the healthy snacking arena that KIND inhabits that I find a very worthy and also admirable player in the space. Here they came up with a very creative and positive contribution against environmental waste. Not sure how far this can get us but it is definitely a step in the right direction, smart marketing, innovative, and beneficial…
