Kelly at Triumph Dining dropped us an email to let us know their outfit is helping the celiac cause by way of helping individual celiacs like you and me. The $10,000 Challenge for Celiac Awareness is a great idea from an organization that has done much for the celiac community. From their site:
If we get 15,000 people like you to sign up for free dining cards, we’ll make a $10,000 donation in support of a national celiac disease awareness campaign. When we hit our goal of 15,000 dining cards in August, we’ll ask the gluten free community to help us decide which non-profit(s) receives the donation.
This effort dovetails with Celiac Snack’s effort to educate restaurants at all levels; from server to owner. Drop by their site today to order your free cards and do your part to raise Celiac Awareness.
$10,000 Challenge for Celiac Awareness [thanks Kelly]
Having worked in a number of restaurants over the years, I’m surprised this hasn’t occurred to me before. Asking restaurant management to be more conscious of gluten-free foods may not be the most effective way to change the industry. Many mid-level managers who run the day-to-day have little impact on the foods and ingredients they buy, even if they have completely control over the menu. That’s because anything they put on the menu has to be sourced from a distributor, and for an overwhelming percentage of restaurants, that distributor is Sysco. This occurred to me as I sat in an airport restaurant looking at a box of Sysco kosher crackers. Sysco is the brand, the manufacturer and the distributor of most foods we eat in restaurants.
This means that while a restaurant manager might see the advantages in offering celiac-friendly menu items, his first attempt to devise such n offering is likely to be discouraging when dealing with the industrialized offerings of Sysco. While Sysco adapts to trends - they have a nutrient calculator and vegetarian diet offerings delineated on their site - a simple search for celiac, or even gluten, returns zero hits.
Helping restaurants might mean helping Sysco. While Sysco could easily seem like the barrier here, seeing them as the ultimate vehicle is more productive. Because in some cases, a gluten-free item doesn’t need to be a special manufacture, it can be the standard, and that’s music to Sysco’s ears.
Contact Sysco
A quick note of thanks from all us Celiacs to Lakefront Brewery out of Milwaukee for bringing New Grist to Summerfest 2008. In a sea of bad lite beers and even worse merlot, New Grist was a shining beacon of gluten-free hope.
As you can tell from this video, it pretty much made my 4th of July.
Head over to the New Grist website to find out where you can get some for yourself.
Tonight, I present my second post in my two-part series, “Ra-Ra Corporate America!”®
First, it was Kraft and their surprisingly candid and helpful reply to my email. Now comes Peapod, a grocery delivery service found in a dozen or so US markets.
Similar to Amazon Fresh, Peapod offers gluten-free browsing. They call it NutriFilter®. Poor branding aside, it’s a great little tool. This lets Peapod shoppers walk through their “aisles” with gluten-free blinders on, something I wish Whole Foods handed out when I walk through their doors.
I haven’t used Peapod in a couple years, but when I did I was pleased. I’ve been testing search results for about 15 minutes with accurate GF results so far, but soon I’ll give this full test run and let you know how it goes.®
http://www.peapod.com
