News Bites: New Poll and News

New Gluten Free Poll

Of course the people we want to know the most about is you! Our newest poll is done in conjunction with Monika from Hipcooks. We want to know what kinds of foods/meals do you want to learn more about? If you were going to take a class, would you be more interested in learning about meals for kids or meals on the go? We want to know! We’ve set up a poll at the top of the right hand column of our blog. Vote and leave comments on this post. Results from this and past polls are available on the “Poll Archive” menu tab above.

Starfish Battered Shrimp

In the news, we heard back from Eric Larsen at Starfish (whose Gluten Free Battered Cod we reviewed) about steps they take to prevent cross-contamination of their battered fish.

Thank you for your message regarding Starfish Gluten Free Battered Fish portions.

As for your question regarding our processing facility, no it is not only used to process Gluten Free Battered products, but not to worry. We process under a strict FDA HACCP plan which assures that we do not have any cross contamination. From the making of the raw batter to the finished product we sanitize all equipment and process only Gluten Free for that day. In addition we have invested in an oil vat that is only used for our Gluten Free production. All equipment goes through a complete litmus test prior to production to assure there is no Gluten present in or on the equipment.

After processing each batch we than send samples of the finished product to a third party lab to test for Gluten and Peanuts. The FDA standard for Gluten Free is no more than 20 PPM (parts per million), but Starfish has set a standard specification of 10 PPM. We have never exceeded this amount; in fact all our tests have come back ND (non-detected). We ship no product until final lab tests are completed.

We spent over three years developing our Gluten Free Batter, as it took a lot of time and money to develop a batter that did not compromise taste and texture as so many GF products do. We have too much riding on this product and our brand to allow cross contamination to occur. We hope some day that we can build our business for this product to support the investment in a Gluten Free only processing line. Until than I can assure you we have taken all steps necessary to deliver what we promise.

Please let us know how you like our Starfish Gluten Free Battered fish portions. We hope to finalize and introduce our new GF breaded shrimp soon, which has been in development for almost 2 years.

Best Regards

Eric
Starfish Inc.
www.star-fish.com

Wow we’re ready to try that shrimp.

Gardening

You may have noticed that we’ve been a little slow on the posting. Sorry about that. Now that spring is here I’ve been putting a lot of time into our garden. Over the past week I built two new raised beds and just yesterday planted some veggies. I’ve got more to go, but l think we’re over the hump. I also still have a lot of reviews to write about our trip to Los Angeles. We’ll get those out soon!