Product of the Month: Eden Food's Snack Packs.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of organic health food companies out there that are owned by larger conglamerates who are not at all in the health food business. It isn't very common anymore to find an all natural food company that remains independant, however Eden Foods is one of those exceptions. Eden Foods began in Ann Arbor, MI in the 1960's and is the oldest natural and organic health food company in North America. Eden Foods originally started out as a co-op that grew into a health foods store that offered a wide variety of foods and eventually expanded into a deli. In 1972, Eden Foods opened up it's first warehouse where it established relations with traditional japanese food makers, to sell products such as sea vegetables, teas, miso, kudzu, mirin, etc. Even though it does import some of it's foods, it still has a large focus on getting certified NON-GMO products from the United States and Canada with a large amount of those foods coming from the midwest. All of Eden Foods products are project NON-GMO verified but they are not certified USDA Organic. When asked about this Eden Foods gave a pretty darn good reply: "Though all EDEN organic food is grown, handled, processed, and certified in a way that meets and exceeds the requirements for using the 'USDA Organic' seal, Eden Foods chooses not to use this seal on its product labels or marketing materials." The reason behind this is because Eden Foods feels that they meet and exceed the USDA certified organic requirments and if you look at the ingredients list of their products, 90% of those ingredients are indeed labeld as organic.

Since, I could go on and on about Eden Foods for quite a while, lets talk about the products that I am crazy about. The big reason I love Eden Foods is because of their dried fruit and nut snack pocket packs. These snack pocket packs include dried organic fruit such as cherries, cranberries and blueberries as well as different nuts and seeds such as tamari almonds, pistachios and spicy pumpkin seeds (my personal favorite). They also have a few blends like their "Quite Moon" blend which contains almonds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, rasins and tart cherries. Finding healthy snacks that are convenient is often times hard but with the wide variety of Eden Pocket Snacks, they don't have to be.