GRAINSTORM goes live!

Posted 02 May 10 by David Zivot

We’ve started on our summer road show: evangelizing fresh-ground ancient grain baking, doing live demos where we grind grain and make mixes on site, giving out baked samples. We’re finding people are really interested in the process and LOVE the product. We were at Dash Kitchens on The Danforth on Friday, and at The Healthy Butcher on Eglinton Av on Saturday. We’ll keep everyone up to date on our activity on this blog as well as on our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/grainstorm.

Our first school fundraising

Posted 27 Feb 10 by David Zivot

We’re totally committed to the idea that baked goods can and should be nutritious real food. And we see our products helping kids develop a life-long preference for wholesome, natural eating rather than processed junk. Plus, as a former teacher and Vice Principal, Lark has seen first hand the critical difference that proper meals and snacks can make in empowering learning.

All this to say that school fundraising allows us to pursue all these goals and more while helping educators and communities. So this month we did our very first pilot fundraising program here in the Beach in Toronto, at St. Dennis School—a small community school with just over 200 students.

The kids brought home a flyer/order form, where parents were introduced to GRAINSTORM and able to order at a discount with 30% of sales going to the school. This single order form generated over $1400 in sales, which translates into over $400 for the school. It also translates into lots of healthy breakfasts and snacks to keep St. Denis kids energized and learning without junk snack blues. Great job St. Dennis parents!

We’re super excited about introducing our product to families all across the city like this. If you would like to see a GRAINSTORM fundraiser at your school, just drop us a note and we’ll take care of the rest.

It's time to Lose It!

Posted 03 Jan 10 by David Zivot

Ah, the beginning of January. The traditional time of year when we all re-double our efforts to eat better, be healthier and maybe lose some weight.

With this in mind, I thought we would pass along a great little tool. It’s an iPhone App called “Lose It!” — and it’s the easiest and most elegant diet tracking software I’ve seen. If you’ve never tried tracking your diet, you should. It is a powerful tool for changing your eating habits and reaching weight loss goals. We know this from first-hand experience.

Of course, you don’t need an iPhone or even more than a notepad to track what you eat. But if you are the geeky type like me, this software makes the process easier, more fun and more powerful. So if you are an iPhone user, check out Lose It! at the App Store  - it’s FREE.

Here’s to healthier eating in 2010!

Custom Holiday Labels

Posted 14 Dec 09 by Lark Barker

Well it’s a little late, we know. But we did a couple of orders with custom labels today and they turned out really well. The sample image says David & Lark but of course we put our customers’ names there. We always had in mind that GRAINSTORM products would make great gifts — and I think this makes it so much better!

Like I said, it’s a little late — I wish it was two weeks earlier — but we can turn an order around in 48 hours or so we still have a few days left before Christmas craziness begins. If you’d like to jump on this last minute bandwagon, just email us and we can get some going for you. BTW, the minimum order for a custom label is 12 bags.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Posted 23 Oct 09 by David Zivot

healthy reading

So much has been said about Michael Pollan’s two books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and In Defense of Food, that we can only say this: If you have any interest in gaining perspective into the modern diet and where it comes from, these are must read books. His investigative journalism is top notch, and his writing is elegant. Our GRAINSTORM philosophy has been informed in no small part by his writing.

Here’s how Publishers’ Weekly summarizes:

Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. By urging us to once again eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach — what he calls nutritionism — and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part.