If you haven’t caught on by now, we’re all about supporting women-owned businesses and it starts with awareness. Here are five women-owned food brands that offer healthy and delicious products that we know you’ll be obsessed with. So add them to your shopping list and spread the word!
Fusion Jerky
We love a good fusion food product and Fusion Jerky is at the top of our list for one of the tastiest fusion snacks in the market. Founder KaiYen Mai has been in the snack game for years prior to launching Fusion Jerky. Mai took over her parent’s Asian snack business in 2003 and was working to expand the product line to be more appealing to mainstream American markets. The result was Fusion Jerky which launched in 2014.
The idea for Fusion Jerky came to Mai as she was summiting Mt. Kilimanjaro, a grueling five to ten-day hike through five unique climate zones. Fueling her body with nutrients was key to making it through the trek. Her diet consisted of high-calorie foods that were high in protein and good carbohydrates. Jerky was the perfect food on-the-go food for such a journey, it’s easy to transport and keep, and it packs a ton of protein. So how does she make a better jerky than what’s already out there in the market?
Growing up in the Bay Area, Mai was inspired to fuse both her native Asian roots and American culture together. The result was an Asian-inspired jerky. What’s the difference between Asian and American jerky? Compared to American jerky, Asian jerky is more soft and tender in texture. Pair this with unique Asian flavors from family recipes that have been passed down for generations, Fusion Jerky is an experience incomparable to any you’ll find at your local store.
Fusion Jerky is all-natural, gluten-free, high in protein, low in sodium, and does not contain any preservatives. If beef isn’t part of your diet, you’d be happy to learn that Fusion Jerky was also one of the first jerky brands to offer an all-natural chicken jerky!
Fusion Jerky comes in nine flavors: Original Hickory, Cracked Pepper, Grilled Island Teriyaki, Chipotle Lime, Japanese BBQ, Garlic Jalapeno, Lemon Pepper, Rosemary Citrus, and Chili Basil.
We recommend Fusion Jerky’s Japanese BBQ Beef Jerky – our personal fave.
Me & The Bees Lemonade
You’ve been hearing it more and more these days, we need to work together to save the bees! Bees are a very important part of our ecosystem, not only do they help pollinate flowers to make the world look prettier, but they also produce that sweet sweet honey and most importantly, they pollinate ninety different food crops. One out of every three or four bites of food we eat is made possible by bees! Land development, electromagnetic pollution, and pesticides have been putting bees in harm’s way making it hard for them to reproduce; it’s pretty simple, fewer bees equal less food.
So how can you help save the bees? By purchasing a bottle of Me & The Bees Lemonade! At the tender age of 11, Mikaila Ulmer signed a deal with Whole Foods to sell her lemonade – what were you doing at the age of 11?! The young entrepreneur came up with the idea for Me & The Bees Lemonade as an entry for a couple of children’s business competitions (the Acton Children’s Business Fair and Austin Lemonade Day). To help get her creative juices churning, Ulmer’s great-grandma Helen sent her a cookbook that contained a recipe for flaxseed lemonade. Ulmer decided she would take the recipe and substitute the sugar with honey and would give a portion of the sales proceeds to help save the bees. The company has now been in business for more than ten years and Ulmer is doing her best juggling speaking events, publishing a book, and being a 15-year-old in High School.
Me & The Bees Lemonade comes in five flavors: Original, Mint, Ginger, Iced Tea, and Prickly Pear.
We recommend Me & The Bees’ ten-bottle variety pack to get a taste of what they have to offer.
Caulipower
When you’re a senior corporate exec and mom of two boys with Celiac disease demanding cauliflower pizza two nights in a row, you don’t slave away in the kitchen for hours, you start your own cauliflower crust company so other moms won’t have to deal with it either. Well, at least that was Caulipower founder Gail Becker’s thought process…
The origin of Caulipower started with a Pinterest fail. Becker was desperately searching for a nutritious, gluten-free recipe that wasn’t filled with fat, sugar, salt, and calories for her boys with Celiac – an autoimmune disease that doesn’t allow the body to process gluten. She scoured through hundreds of thousands of recipes and landed on a cauliflower pizza crust recipe. After struggling and making a mess in her kitchen for over ninety minutes, she was finally able to produce something that was quite tasty but not the prettiest to look at. The boys loved it a little too much because they asked for it another night and that’s when Becker decided it was time to quit her job and create a product that would save moms and people in general, hours of struggling in the kitchen.
But it wasn’t just solely for those reasons, Becker started Caulipower because she had been feeling frustrated at the glass ceiling that corporate America imposes upon women, her father who was an entrepreneur had recently passed, and she realized that the gluten-free industry wasn’t changing anytime soon so she might as well contribute to building the momentum. Becker quit her job in May 2016, launched Caulipower in February 2017, and took on VC money in September 2017.
The idea of cauliflower pizza was very strange at the time so when Becker approached food manufacturing plants it wasn’t received very enthusiastically. Not to mention that many manufacturers are very male-dominated, these are not the type of men that are following what’s trending online in the food industry so it took a little work on Becker’s part to convince them to buy into the idea. Nevertheless, she prevailed and now Celiacs across the US can easily walk into their local Wholefoods or Amazon Prime themselves a gluten-free Caulipower pizza night and not have to deal with an awful lot of cleanup.
The Caulipower line consists of Cauliflower Pizzas (nine varieties), Cauliflower Pizza Crust, Chicken Tenders, Riced Cauliflower, Sweet PotaTOASTS, and Cauliflower Tortillas.
We recommend an old faithful – Caulipower’s Margherita Cauliflower Crust Pizza
Miyoko’s Creamery
If you’re vegan or vegan-ish, then chances are you’ve had cheese from Miyoko’s Creamery. Miyoko Schinner is the founder of Miyoko’s Creamery, she’s also an award-winning vegan celebrity chef and is recognized for kicking off the vegan cheese revolution. Miyoko has always loved animals but it wasn’t till the age of 12 that she decided to become a vegetarian, this was a pivotal moment in her life that would determine what she would dedicate the rest of her life to.
Miyoko was born and raised in Japan till the age of 7 but then moved to the States with her parents. After graduating from college Miyoko moved back to Japan on a quest to find what she felt was a missing part of her ever since she had left her hometown. When Miyoko returned to Japan in the ’80s, french cuisine was at its height. It was the first time that she experienced a diet rich in dairy, cheese, and butter, and it was also the first time that she realized dairy did not sit well with her stomach. After cutting out dairy from her diet, Miyoko regained her health but she so longed for those delicious french style desserts so she decided to make her own vegan variations.
Miyoko started making and selling vegan pound cakes three days a week while running ten-course vegan tasting nights, developing menus for restaurants, putting on cooking demos, and consulting for a natural-food distributor on the side. She eventually got burnt out from the hustle and opened up a restaurant with a partner for what she thought would provide some level of stability. That turned out to be a whole drama on its own that we won’t get into here so we’ll let you Google what happened there.
Long story short Miyoko returned to the States shortly after where she continued her work building her vegan empire which included a vegan cafe, a very successful product called UnTurkey, and finally an artisanal vegan cheese website which is what we now know and love as the Miyoko’s Creamery brand. There is so much more to this amazing woman’s story, we just gave you a little taste of it so please look her up!
In addition to vegan cheeses, Miyoko’s Creamery also offers spreadable vegan cheeses and vegan butter.
We recommend Mikyoko’s Creamery’s Vegan Cream Cheese Fish-Free Lox.
GoMacro
When you discover something good, you have to share it with the world – naturally. When Amelia Kirchoff was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003, she decided to turn down the five years of drug treatment and instead try out a macrobiotic diet. A plant-based macrobiotic diet entails eliminating all meat, dairy, fish, fat, sugar, and processed foods and eating primarily fruits and vegetables. Luckily Kirchoff and her family own an organic farm so there were plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables available to her. As a dessert lover, Kirchoff naturally put extra energy into developing healthy macrobiotic treats to satisfy her sweet tooth. After tasting her mother’s health bars, daughter Jola Sonkin knew that Kirchoff was onto something. Sonkin took the first batch of MacroBars to sell at local health food stores and GoMacro was born.
The mother-daughter duo went into business in 2004 and sixteen years later they are still privately owned and funded, allowing them to operate to the high-quality standards that they had started with since day one. GoMacro is 100% plant-based, all ingredients are organic and sourced from non-GMO certified growers who follow sustainable farming practices. All MacroBars are USDA organic, gluten-free certified, vegan certified, kosher certified, and non-GMO project verified, as well as RAW and CLEAN certified – tastes too good to be true? Believe it!
Oh, AND they give back! When you purchase the Everlasting Joy MacroBar (Coconut + Almond Butter + Chocolate Chips) year-round, GoMacro will donate a percentage of annual net proceeds to Feeding San Diego and Solutions for Change. Check out their site to learn about their monthly give-back MacroBars.
We recommend GoMacro’s coconut, almond butter, and chocolate chip Everlasting Joy MacroBar.