CERTIFIED ORGANIC AND HIGHER IN FAT


The ABC's inside business gives a plug to entrepreneurial husband and wife team Monica Waters and James Meldrum, founders of Nourish, purveyor of the successful Whole Kids range of organic snack foods. Waters and Meldrum abandoned careers in corporate marketing in favour of organic snacks. Their products are apparently sold in a range of outlets, including schools, which are being pressured to stop selling "junk" through canteens.

Waters and Meldtrum discuss their motivations:

We researched the issues and found that most conventional children's snack foods were poor in nutrients and full of unnecessary food additives, preservatives and colourings. Many had high levels of sugar, fat, sodium and were often high in calories. Also, what we read about the effects of food additives on kids really disturbed us, despite many manufacturers making over-the-top claims suggesting these foods were healthy and actually good for our kids.

The order page briefly describes their Organic Apple & Sultana Fruit Bars ($7.25 for 240 grams, plus $5.00 shipping per order):

Oven-baked for a great taste and without all those artificial nasties.

Those "artificial nasties" are, of course, deemed to be safe for human consumption.

Interestingly, the nutritional profile for the organic fruit bars is not much different to a similar Kelloggs product, K-time Twists® Apple & Cinnamon Flavour ($3.89 for 222 grams but currently on special for $2.99 at the local grocery): calories are almost identical but the organic bars are lower in carbohydrates and sodium. The organic bars contain much more fat, however: 7.6 grams total fat per 100 grams of product, of which 4.7 grams is the nasty saturated variety -- they contain butter. The K-time Twists contain 3.2 grams of fat of which only 1.4 grams is saturated.

I'll leave it to readers to decide if it's worth paying extra for an organic product, especially one that has a much higher fat content than its artificially enhanced rivals.