Home Market Foods debuts bars, breath strips

Chain Drug Review, June 21, 2004

NORWOOD, Mass. -- Home Market Foods has expanded beyond its core cooked food offerings with the launch of the Beyond Nutrition brand, encompassing nutritional bars and NutriStrips fortified breath strips.

To develop nutritional bars the company hired its own food scientist and surveyed all available bars with the goal of improving on taste, texture shelf life and product integrity.

"The most important objective was to have a line of products with integrity," Home Market Foods chief executive officer Doug Atamian says. "We wanted to make sure that what we put on the label was in the product. We didn't want to make any crazy health claims or have any dubious ingredients."

The two Beyond Nutrition bars, the Hurricane and Tornado, were developed for 7-Eleven Stores. The 95-gram bars each have 31 grams of protein and a relatively balanced nutritional profile.

"Everyone who's tried these bars just can't believe how tasty they are," remarks Atamian. "We set out to make them that way, and we accomplished our goal. We went another order of magnitude than the current technology."

Atamian emphasizes that Home Market Foods is here "for the long haul" as opposed to the "fly by night" companies that he says have plagued the nutritional bar category.

In the breath strip category Home Market Foods has broken new ground with NutriStrips' delivery of "nutrition and energy anytime," comments Atamian.

The line comprises a strawberry-flavor multivitamin strip providing 100% of the recommended daily allowance of a number of vitamins; a caffeinated, mint-flavored strip for energy; an all-natural energy strip providing B vitamins and ginseng; and an immune-enhancing strip with vitamin C and echinacea.

NutriStrips, packaged in hermetically sealed foil blister packs, have a long shelf life and do not clump or crack, Atamian points out. They were created by Home Market Foods' own food scientists, he says, stressing that full chemical assays are available for all the strips.

NutriStrips are offered in countertop and floor display units.

Both NutriStrips and Beyond Nutrition bars will be shipped via Home Market Foods' national distribution system.

"We're already into supermarkets, we're already into mass, we're already into convenience stores," Atamian notes. "Chain drug is the new channel for us, so we're really excited about that opportunity."

Home Market Foods Inc.

140 Morgan Drive Norwood, Mass. 02062

Key contact:

Doug Atamian, Chief Executive Officer

Web site: homemarketfoods.com

Phone: (781) 948-1500

Fax: (781) 702-6171

Primary business:

HEALTH CARE

Fortified breath strips

CONSUMABLES

Nutritional bars

Marketplace booth #700