Vana Life Foods

I’m very proud to say my first big volume R&D project as Chefdbrown Ltd. is soon to be on shelves!!

meet Vana Life Foods…

Vana Life came about when a fellow came to me with the desire to illustrate how a vegan diet could be healthy and hearty. He was the model, a 200+ lb super fit guy who grew up on  a strictly vegan diet.

He pointed out that he spend most of his life eating a largely pulse heavy diet – lentils, chickpeas, etc., and he wanted to promote and develop a product that drew awareness to the benefit they provide…

I’d been working right at that time with an amazing juvenile green chickpea – (harvested while still green off the vine and then quick frozen right away, so you got a raw, nutrient dense, bright green chick pea to work with that eats like edamame…)

I showed him some and he fell in love with them, he went out and met the farmer – now here we are today..

tasting in the lab – we worked in an amazing retort facility, which is essentially like a high temperature sous-vide on a massive scale. Like 150,000 units at a time, lol.  That’s intense recipe work, let me tell you…

then we had the highlight of working with the food styling genius of Nathan Fong for package pics…

always a ton of fun, lol –

and of course once you’ve brought in Nathan you have to step up the food photography…

so you call Hamid Attie.

I’ve really enjoyed working with Hamid over the years, he’s a rock star!!

and he lets me ask tons of amateur photographer questions, so I always come away having learned something new.

that’s our green chickpea with potatoes, tomato, kale and olive oil

this is one’s with coconut, cilantro & lime

 complete meals, shelf stable, pasteurized, gluten  free, GMO free, Vegan, high in protein, low in sodium, and so on, but they still taste like real food.

They’ve done great in taste testings so I guess now we’ll wait and see what the real population thinks….

I’ll keep you posted