With all of that being said, I know that the same does not hold true for the Enjoy Life brand. I have to admit that I believed that this would be the case when creating the Enjoy Life brand, as I understood the importance of providing safe and great tasting products. I actually “bet on this” during our early years when the company was especially watching its expenses very carefully. We leaned on our passionate customer base to truly help in growing and building the company. We did this by proving a “retailer request” letter to all of customers that were buying online, in the hopes that these passionate customers would bring this to their local retailers to help us drive retail distribution of Enjoy Life. Well, it worked, as we are now fortunate to have distribution in approximately 9,000 retail stores in every state of the US and throughout all provinces in Canada – pretty cool, huh?

We have seen this passion repeat itself over and over again throughout the past 8 years. From the customer who writes a personal handwritten note, drops us a line via email, or calls us directly and has more than a typical conversation with our customer service team. We have seen it whenever we have exhibited at a show or a walk. We have also seen it through our Facebook page and via Twitter. It has been a humbling experience for me, and as a result, I view myself as a steward of the brand and the company because I know how invested our customers are in this great brand. It is also why we truly believe in transparency when communicating with our customers. We don’t shy away from any conversation and welcome the chance to communicate with you – our passionate and invested customer.

For all of these reasons, we have now created our new brand ambassador program – the Enjoyables. Our brand ambassadors are the most passionate of the passionate, as they are giving of themselves and their personal time to help in spreading the word of Enjoy Life to others.

What an incredibly unique and meaningful story!! From the bottom of my heart I salute you and thank you for being a part of something special.

For those with multiple food allergies, a simple “gluten-free” statement on the front of a package or in the ingredients isn’t enough. Many gluten-free baked goods rely upon a rogues gallery of allergens for functionality: eggs or milk protein for structure, butter for flavor, nuts and/or soy for texture or protein. Additionally, a significant number of manufacturers rely on starches and “white flours” to create a more neutral-flavored wheat analog in their products. Corn, potato, rice, and tapioca are almost always at the top of the ingredient statement. According to Shelly Case, a registered dietician with the Celiac Disease Foundation who was quoted in the aforementioned Wall Street Journal article, “many packaged gluten-free products are even higher in carbs, sugar, fat and calories than their regular counterparts, and they tend to be lower in fiber, vitamins and iron. Gluten-free does not mean nutritious.”

At Enjoy Life we try to formulate snacks that can be enjoyed by many, without entirely sacrificing nutrition. Yes, our cookies are sweet and taste like cookies – but we use a good amount of sorghum flour, a grain with a sweet toasty flavor that is a good source of protein and fiber – instead of a combination of starches that lack both. We want our products to be safe to eat for many with food allergies and to taste good, while maintaining some nutritional integrity. At the same time, we know we’re know we’re making sweet treats; we just want to make them a little better than the other available options.

In the future we’ll be looking at other grains and sweeteners as we continue to improve and diversify our offerings. One thing we promise, though, is to always keep our ingredients safe for you.

It was a delightful chat that ended abruptly when I felt another tap on my right shoulder. I turned around to find a gentleman kneeling in the aisle, smiling broadly at me. He, too, began with an apology for reading my presentation from his seat (three rows back, clearly his mom fed him carrots when he was a kid). The next few minutes of conversation encapsulated the whole purpose of my work with Enjoy Life… He shared with me that his young daughter had recently developed severe and potentially life-threatening food allergies. His daughter was literally at the physician’s office undergoing additional testing, as we were chatting at 30,000 feet. He was beyond thrilled to learn about products that are free of the 8 most common allergens, almost coming to tears at the discovery. This meant his daughter could now freely have cookies, and chocolate, and snack bars! I gave him some coupons, made a few suggestions on where he could find our products, and a business card with the assurance that if he needed to chat or had any questions, to call me. He announced that he would be calling his wife when we landed, and I could hear him on the phone enthusiastically sharing his great discovery before we even got off the plane!

Oh I know that may sound a little mushy, but it really is a ton of fun, and talk about a cool job! I just helped a little girl eat chocolate again! So I have been thinking about this. Maybe the Enjoy Life team should wear a logo button or an Enjoy Life shirt when we’re on the road, so that you can spot us in the crowd. It would be like the “Where’s Waldo” of the food industry. How much fun would that be…we could give away some awesome free product if we are spotted in a grocery store, in an airport, or high up in the sky. We love chatting with you, so I hope you will stop us if you see us. I speak for the team when I say that we want to hear your stories, we want to chat with you, and we absolutely want to hear how you or your child’s life has been changed.

Talk to me…I’m listening!

I hope everyone is enjoying the summer as we are doing here in Chicago. I have been with Enjoy Life for almost 6 months and it has gone by really quickly! We are currently working on a lot of projects that you will eventually get to see in the market place. We are very excited and working diligently to make sure everything is in the right place at the right time, so that the only thing you have to do is Enjoy Life!

In my last blog post, I wrote about the partnership we developed with WTTW PBS Channel 11 in Chicago. As you may remember, this partnership is allowing us to reach out to people like you, that is people interested in eating healthier diets, so that we can provide more detail about our products and their benefits. Well, on August 22^nd WTTW PBS Channel 11 will host a big event in the Lincoln Park neighborhood in Chicago, where we are expecting more than 5,000 people! It is the 7th Annual WTTW Kids Fun and Run. We are now preparing everything we need in order to participate. Several of us will be at the event handing out Enjoy Life product samples, answering any questions you may have about our products, and enjoying the summer day with everyone else. If you are near the Chicago area, I hope to see you there!

On another, but very important note, I want to thank all of you for your feedback through our blog, Facebook page, and phone calls. Your perspective is helping us to better understand what you like and dislike, so that we can focus on developing better products that you and your family will enjoy…. Again, thank you!

Enjoy Life!

The only way for someone with food allergies to steer clear of a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction is to completely avoid foods that may contain the allergens. Food-allergic consumers are forced to decipher labels for every food product they purchase, every time they shop — a terrifying and dangerous process — made even more difficult by the technical language used in ingredient statements. Today, the beneficiaries include more than the regular consumer. Other, very important shoppers, such as school nurses, teachers, caregivers, and chefs are now able to help millions of food-allergic consumers avoid certain food allergens.

Allergen advisory labels, which use wording like “may contain” or “made in a facility that processes,” are what you see now. Surveys suggest that food-allergic consumers may increasingly be ignoring these warnings, presumably out of frustration and doubt regarding the trustworthiness of the information.

If I could provide some advice based on many years of searching for safe, allergen-friendly ingredients to use in our products, it would be: know your brands – know the companies you are buying from. Ask questions, such as what allergens are in the facility where the product is made? What is their process for sourcing ingredients? Do they test for allergens? What levels do they test for allergens? (i.e. what part-per-million do they test to) Do they have an allergen management program? You may not get all the answers you are looking for, but that in itself will tell you about the company you are dealing with.

In this business of making tasty, allergen-friendly products, the only way to build trust is to be forthright, open, and honest.

Happy trails!

Summer is in full swing and that means one thing: FAAN walks! We are VERY excited to announce that Enjoy Life Foods will be participating in 50 FAAN walks this summer!! FAAN walks will be taking place nationwide from August 14^th to December 5^th and we are looking forward to being at each and every one. This is the first year that we are attending so many walks, and we couldn’t be more excited to get to interact with all of our fans!  For a full listing of event locations and times, be sure to check out our events page, or go directly to the FAAN 2010 walk locations.

Make sure to stop by our booth to get a variety of tasty samples! Are you excited for the FAAN walk in your area? What is your favorite part of the walk?

See you out there!

I co-founded Enjoy Life 8 years ago, and as I have stated in one of my earlier blogs, I do not have any food allergies or intolerances. However, I have had probably thousands of conversations with our customers over the years about their personal and family food issues.

I thought that I had a great understanding of the challenges that one would face on a daily basis when needing to avoid gluten and/or other foods due to allergies. I have heard the stories about children going to birthday parties and not being able to eat the same way as other children, or going shopping and needing to read labels religiously, or calling up the food manufacturers directly to have the additional reassurance that the products are made in a safe environment and on dedicated equipment, or going to a restaurant and having the wait staff not fully understand why you would ask if there is wheat in the entrée or peanuts in the kitchen.

As a wise man once said, “to understand a man, you’ve got to walk a mile in his shoes, whether they fit or not.” Well, I’m not sure I walked a full mile, but I did walk a few blocks. I decided that I was going to go on a gluten-free diet for two weeks, to try and understand the challenges someone with gluten sensitivity may face, on a deeper level.

In addition to eating our wonderful Enjoy Life products, I also went to my local Whole Foods and purchased some additional gluten-free products. Being in the industry, I already had a head start in knowing which products I could trust. For me personally, it was most difficult to find an acceptable substitute for bread. I tried many, including toasted and untoasted, but was not able to find bread that I really enjoyed. Instead, I just decided to do without (which probably wasn’t the worst thing, because I ended up losing a few pounds in the process).

The part of going gluten-free that I found most difficult was going out to eat. I realized just how scary it can be and how vigilant one must be at all times. I have gotten quite used to going out to eat with friends and colleagues who have various food sensitivities, and thus have seen the process of asking lots of questions of the wait staff to ensure a “safe” meal. However, being the person actually asking the questions turned out to be quite a bit different. I questioned everything…Was the broth made with flour? What do they use as a thickener in the sauce? Do you use separate utensils? I started to understand the challenges even further… Did this waitress “get it”? Is the restaurant gluten-free friendly? If I don’t feel 100% confident, do I still eat the food, or do I change my order?

As careful as I tried to be, I definitely made a mistake one evening when I went out to dinner with my family, my brother’s family, and my parents. The restaurant had a hors d’oerves buffet and since I was starving, I couldn’t wait to dig in. The Swedish meatballs looked great, as did the spicy Buffalo wings (I love spicy food). It’s not that I was totally oblivious to the fact that I was on a gluten-free diet, it’s just that I did not go through the whole process in my head about what happens in the kitchen with these items. At face value, I was eating meat and chicken… no big deal, right? But of course, as many of you know, these items are usually dusted or rolled in flour (and not the gluten-free type).

My gluten-free experience was a great help in understanding what our valued customers deal with on a daily basis. I know that the big difference, and something I could not replicate, is the sick feeling I should have had after eating those meatballs and Buffalo wings. And although I did not walk a full mile in your shoes, I think by walking a few blocks, I accomplished at least a few things. First, it has increased my appreciation for those who truly need to be vigilant on a daily basis even further. And second, it has increased my desire to continually strive for excellence at Enjoy Life, so that our foods are known not for being gluten-free and free of all the common allergens, but rather for being great tasting, better for you foods that are perfect for everyone!

8:00 Arrive at Enjoy Life – I’ll spend about an hour catching up with the Enjoy Life team (most are here by then), responding to emails, making phone calls, and planning my day. I also check in with our intern, Judi, to find out her plan for the day.

9:00 Innovation Meeting – I get together with Federico, our president, to discuss our current and future products and new product development. We have a lot of work to get done, so our meetings can be pretty long.  We are working on implementing some new systems, so sometimes our meetings can stretch out to almost four hours. Luckily, this doesn’t happen often!

10:00 Taste Test – Whenever we work on a new product, we have a taste test with everyone on the staff. We don’t sample just one product; we have a whole panel of things to taste. I recently gave Scott, our CEO, a sampling of eight different Snickerdoodle cookies to try! Usually, we taste only three to four different versions of the same product. Once we have a few samples we like, we will run it in our plant and send out samples to our customers (like you!) for evaluation. What you say is very important, because it helps us determine what we are going to introduce next.

11:00 Plant Production Test – We run a small “pilot run” of a new recipe (about 50 lbs or so) through our equipment to test it. This way, if it does not work, we have not wasted too much time and ingredients on the test. If it does work, we do a “scale up,” in which we run an entire full-sized batch to see how it runs. Once that works, we add it into our regular production schedule.

12:00 Lunch!

1:00 Formula work – While I work on new products, I play around on paper with the recipes, which we call “formulas.” I figure out costs, look at quantities of ingredients, and call suppliers. Sometimes I also use this time to meet with suppliers and evaluate samples with Nicki, who purchases all our ingredients.

2:00 New Product Meeting – In these meetings we talk about our great new products and production timelines. We discuss how the product will be launched, necessary sales support, and evaluate any market research we may have.

3:00 Emails and calls – A lot goes on at the office. We have meetings, you send us questions, suppliers want to get in touch. I take about a half hour in the middle of my day to respond to my email and return phone calls.

3:30 to 6:00 Experimenting in the lab – I make sure I spend some time in the lab. I take photos of new products I am working on, adjust a formula, or make a new recipe for our website. Because my job is split between two areas, I need to give equal attention to both Research and Development, and Innovation/New Products, which means some days I can only afford a few hours in the lab.

6:00 Go home – When my work is done I leave for the day. It isn’t always at 6 – sometimes I stay as late as 8 pm, depending on what I need to get done. That’s pretty unusual. I actually really love my work, so staying a little longer is, in fact, quite fun for me. When I’m home, I study up a bit on food science, eat a good gluten-free meal (I’m lucky to have no real food allergies), and go to sleep, so that I can be refreshed when I start all over again. I usually wake up excited to start my day. Because there’s always something fun to work on, and sometimes I don’t know what it is until I show up!

One of the habits is my obsession with memorizing lines from movies. When I find a movie I like, I will watch it over and over, and start to memorize certain lines from that movie. I will then use those lines as part of my everyday life when I want to make a certain point. Weird, huh? I told you I have some idiosyncrasies.

One of my favorite movies is Notting Hill, starring Hugh Grant as a down-in-his-luck London travel bookstore owner, and Julia Roberts as an Academy Award winning American movie star who has no luck with relationships. At one point in the film, when she is trying to get the Hugh Grant character to love her after she had made a few mistakes, she says:

“The fame thing isn’t really real. Don’t forget, I’m also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.”

Why am I sharing this with you today (besides the fact that I really like the movie)?

Over the weekend, I was taking a look at some of the recent correspondence that we have received from some of our customers who were expressing displeasure. Don’t get me wrong; 95% of what we hear from people is positive; people happy with the products and value that we provide. But as is true in any business, there are going to people who are unhappy about some things, and we take these comments to heart. We always do what we can to correct the issues immediately. As well, we review all comments with an open mind in the hope that it will make us a better company.

What struck me lately is the small minority of people who are referring to Enjoy Life as if we were some large “corporate giant” who didn’t care about its consumer. When we were a smaller and younger company, people would provide feedback to us, but be a bit more understanding when we made mistakes, because we were young. We are a more mature company now, and while we wish we were perfect, and we certainly strive to be just that, at times we still make mistakes. But they are just that, mistakes. We never knowingly do things that will make our products less than perfect, less affordable, or less valuable to our customers’ daily lives.

To paraphrase Julia Roberts in Notting Hill:

“You see, the fact is, this “big company” image that many people have about Enjoy Life, well it just isn’t real. We’re just a bunch of everyday people, dedicated to making the best tasting and safest products that we can, and asking our customers to love us”.

Every single day, we try to be the best that we can be, producing the best products to the best of our ability, with no mistakes, so you can love us just a little bit more.

This week’s post is by Jenny Kales. Jenny is the author of her own blog at http://www.nut-freemom.blogspot.com/, where she writes about her experiences raising her two daughters, one of whom has life-threatening allergies, as well as about tips she hopes will help other parents in similar situations.

As the mother of two girls, one with a severe peanut and tree nut allergy, and one without any food allergies, I know how hard it is to find delicious and nutritious snacks to suit them both. And like all of us dealing with food allergies, I am all too aware of how hard it is to trust food labels, especially for snack foods or sweet treats. Labels list incomplete information that require a phone call to the company, or worse, they are made on equipment with peanuts or tree nuts. It’s confusing for me, so I know that for people who don’t deal with food allergies every day, reading food labels seems especially daunting.

I was reminded of this once again when my youngest daughter’s Girl Scout troop leader called me at home in a panic one day during a meeting. There is a Girl Scout with severe peanut and tree nut allergies in the troop and they weren’t sure what to serve her as a snack. They couldn’t reach her mother and were asking me if I thought a certain item that they had on hand was OK.

Now, I knew that the item in question did not have any allergy warnings on the package; however it was made in a facility that processed peanuts and tree nuts. There was no way I wanted to OK a food for another allergic child without their mother’s approval.

My oldest, food-allergic daughter overheard the conversation. “Mom,” she said. “What about Cocoa Loco? We just bought another box.” Yes! Because Enjoy Life Foods snacks are made in a dedicated nut-free facility, I never have to wonder or worry if they are safe.

Sure enough, we had an unopened box of Cocoa Loco from Enjoy Life in the pantry. Since we live only a block from the school, my daughter offered to walk it over to the meeting, so the Girl Scout could have a safe, nut-free snack.

My daughter reported back to me that the Girl Scout in question had a big smile on her face when she saw the snacks and knew she that could have them. The Girl Scout leaders said they would never be without a box of Enjoy Life snacks or cookies at future meetings. Best of all, my daughter felt like she had helped another nut-allergic child not feel “left out” as she sometimes has been herself.

The best part is that both of my kids love Enjoy Life Chewy On the Go Bars, Trail Mix and Granola. And I love spreading the word about Enjoy Life’s allergy-friendly foods, because then everyone has a safe snack when they want it!