My dear friend Cortney introduced me to her friend Ariane Resnick some years ago when we all used to live in the bay area. Oh. how I miss it there. Any how, talented and intelligent as she is beautiful, Ariane has her own company: Rawk-n-Roll Cuisine. It is a line of raw, vegan, all organic snacks. I am not a vegan, but am open to trying anything. Especially something as pure and delicious as this! The flavors packed into this line are crazy good and you can read as well as recognize all of the ingredients put into them! Fantastic! If you live in Southern California, you can get them at a Whole Foods store and select health food stores. And they are expanding!
I have personally tried: Nothchos, Kaletaliano, Buffalo Bill and Onion a million among the Kale chips. And my favorite are the Notchos. They are smokey and very rich in taste! Among their granola, I have had the Monkey bites (banana granola) and the Kanga Crunch (hello, chocolate!). Both are great as an on the go snack or have some with some soy milk for breakfast! Crunchy, flavor packed granola bites that will satisfy your sweet tooth just enough to say, 'that's what I needed.' I like them both because I love bananas and chocolate. So it's a win-win. I mix them up in a little zip up baggy and have them as a snack.
I asked Ariane to let me in on how exactly she got her company started. She began the company as an unemployment project after being laid off from a GM position at a raw restaurant called Juliano's Planet Raw. She began making raw food meals for a few people as a personal chef/raw foods instructor, and people kept telling her that she should be selling these snacks! She then approached Erewhon, a health food store in Beverly Hills, in January 2009. Where after tasting the Notchos, they told her to go become a brand and that they would buy a case of whatever she was selling.
It took her six weeks from that meeting to have her products on the shelves! She did all the licensing/insurance/commercial kitchen rental/ label concepts/etc. in that time. Everything sold well, but Notchos has been flying off the shelves (and I understand this lol).
Rawk-n-Roll Cuisine began accumulating more small stores, then got into Whole Foods in June of 2009, which their distributor said was unheard of, since no one was ever accepted so fast. This has helped the company grown even more.
Give them a try and check them out at the following links:
Website: http://www.rawknrollcuisine.com/
Become a fan on Facebook: Rawk-n-Roll-Cuisine on Facebook
Follow them on Blogger: http://rawknrollcuisine.blogspot.com/