If you were to ask any great chef what the secret to making a delicious meal is, he would tell you that you have to start with the best ingredients you can find. At Altitude Snacks, we believe that this is true for snacks as well. If you have had our snacks before, you know that we choose our ingredients carefully and make sure we are only putting the very best fruits and nuts in your pouch. We are committed to making only yummy, high quality and healthy snacks. Check out our previous Blog post “What is a Healthy Snack” to read more about this.
You might be wondering how we determine what ingredients are the “best.” We put each of our ingredients through a very thorough test to determine if they belong in our delicious and nutritious blends. One of the cornerstones of our snacks is that they all contain absolutely no added sugars ever. Fruit contains naturally occurring sugar and when food manufacturers add more, it turns a healthy food into a candy. We work hard to ensure that we only use fruits that are dried with no extra added sugar, and for some of our ingredients this proves more difficult than for others. The vast majority of dried pineapple on the market have added sugar because it lasts longer on the shelf, but as with all of our dried fruits, we ensure that our pineapple contains only natural sugar. Added sugars are becoming more widely recognized as a health concern which is why the FDA has started requiring all nutrition fact labels to list added sugars and natural sugars separately. All of our labels already proudly display 0 grams added sugars!
At Altitude Snacks we also believe that artificial flavors, colors and preservatives do not belong in our bodies and therefore should not be in our snacks. All of our fruits and nuts are prepared for packaging without the use of any artificial preservatives. A very common preservative of apricots is sulfites. When apricots are treated with this chemical, they turn bright orange; compare that to ones that are dried naturally which stay a light brownish color, like the ones we use in our Trail Blaze blend. It’s not always so easy to tell just by looking at something if it was treated with an artificial flavor, color or preservative, which is why it’s so important to check labels before buying any sort of packaged food.
Gluten and dairy are two of the most common food allergies and we are very glad to say that all of our snacks are gluten and dairy free. This may seem like a slam dunk because fruits and nuts naturally don’t contain gluten or dairy, but many of the most common additives to these foods do. Gluten can be an ingredient in the spice blends used to add flavor to nuts. This is why we only lightly season with salt or pepper.
We also make sure all of our ingredients are non-GMO. All of our fruits and nuts are non-GMO and so is the oil that we use to roast our cashews. Soybean oil is frequently used to roast nuts which can be problematic because soybeans are one of the most commonly genetically modified foods. We made a very clear choice to make all of our products soy free, and we use sunflower oil to roast our cashews. There are currently no genetically modified sunflower species, so we feel really good about using this oil.
We hope that after reading this you feel even more confident that when you’re opening up a pouch of Altitude Snacks that you’re making a great choice for your body. Our snacks always have no added sugars, no artificial flavors, colors or preservatives, are gluten, dairy and soy free, non-GMO, vegan and all natural and we are very proud to share them with you!