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- Jeb Wallace-Brodeur
- Jud Horner and John Lamppa producing Real Green Foods salad dressings with microgreens at Butterfly Bakery of Vermont
In a limited series that hit Netflix on January 1, sets of identical twins follow different diets — one vegan, one omnivorous — for eight weeks to see how food choices and lifestyle affect their bodies.
“You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment” attempts to determine “if it’s about your greens, not your genes,” as the trailer says. Spoiler alert: The Stanford University clinical trial on which the series is based showed that consuming a healthy vegan diet improves overall cardiovascular health.
The study had its detractors, as nutritionist, author and public health advocate Marion Nestle pointed out recently on her Food Politics blog. But besides being “clever and adorable,” Nestle wrote, the twin approach “is further evidence for the benefits of largely plant-based diets.”
Vermont’s growing vegan food scene makes it easy for consumers to jump into the plant-based world, whether full-on or as a “flexitarian,” occasionally substituting vegan for animal-based products. Heck, we’ve even got vegan cheese and creemees now.
Many of these products tout wellness — both for the people eating them and for the planet. Here are two new Vermont companies that aim to make going green delicious.
— J.B.
‘Greens on Greens’
Real Green Foods, realgreenfoods.com
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- Courtesy
- Real Green Foods’ Ginger Turmeric dressing on greens
“Is your salad dressing hurting your healthy diet?” asks a headline on Harvard Health Publishing. The article proceeds to cite a registered dietitian who notes that people often drench bowlfuls of fresh, nutritious vegetables with prepared dressings that are high in calories, sodium, sugar and saturated fat.
For the past 15 months, a company called Real Green Foods has been producing a line of refrigerated salad dressings that aims to let people have their dressing and eat healthily, too.
On the morning of January 12, two of Real Green’s three cofounders, John Lamppa and Jud Horner, were at Butterfly Bakery of Vermont’s 16,000-square-foot facility in Barre bottling the largest weekly production run to date of their six dressings.
A Butterfly Bakery employee working with the duo weighed handfuls of fresh microgreens and whirred them in a huge blender to stir into the previously mixed dressing bases.
All Real Green dressings contain microgreens, from Lamppa’s favorite maple mustard flavor, made with syrup from Nott Family Farm in Hartford, to Horner’s preferred — and seriously spicy — serrano lime. They’re especially proud of their new Green Goddess, which — like all of their dressings, but unlike most by that name — is vegan.
Essentially, Lamppa said, Real Green enables people to eat “greens on greens.”
The company’s carefully composed mix of organic microgreens is grown sustainably indoors on a Massachusetts farm, in soil with a recirculating irrigation system.
Their proprietary combination includes tender shoots of broccoli, pea, radish and red cabbage. The greens are Real Green’s not-so-secret nutritional weapon, adding flavor and body while keeping fats, sugar, salt and calories low and bringing vitamins and minerals to the party.
The bottle declares that Real Green’s are “the healthiest dressings,” and Horner offered a chart of comparative numbers to prove it.
The cofounders believe Real Green’s health halo merits their premium price of about $8.99 per 8.5-ounce glass bottle. They are targeting a surprisingly open niche in the $4.1 billion U.S. prepared salad dressing market, as tracked by market research company IBISWorld.
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- Jeb Wallace-Brodeur
- Jud Horner and John Lamppa of Real Green Foods
Lamppa, 38, who now lives in Norwich, earned a PhD in protein engineering from Dartmouth College but deviated from an expected career in biopharmaceuticals to work in food startups. At one, he met Horner, 71, based in Hull, Mass., who has a long track record of working in consumer packaged goods.
“We made John the CEO because this was originally his idea,” Horner said. Plus, he added, Lamppa is a supertaster — someone with a highly sensitive palate who can detect subtle flavors that others cannot.
“I’m a picky eater,” Lamppa joked.
About five years ago, Lamppa recalled, he and Horner “started kicking around some ideas” featuring one of Lamppa’s food passions.
“I’ve been a big consumer of microgreens. I just love eating them. I love that they’re highly nutritious,” Lamppa said. Because microgreens contain the nutrients to power a growing plant, “They’re just more nutritionally dense than a lot of lettuce or other leafy greens out there,” he explained.
“I said, ‘Hey, it’d be great if microgreens were more readily available beyond just the clamshell at the grocery store, like in everyday products like soups, salad dressings and beverages.’”
Since the early days of recipe development, the Real Green team has partnered closely with Butterfly Bakery owner Claire Georges to refine, blend and bottle its dressings.
“Claire really brought these to life and even had some excellent flavor suggestions, like the Ginger Turmeric,” Lamppa said.
Real Green is among Butterfly Bakery’s two dozen clients at its Barre facility, where Butterfly Bakery also produces its own specialty foods and Fat Toad Farm caramels, which Georges purchased in 2022.
Horner said the January 12 production run of 540 bottles was more than double what the company has been shipping weekly to its distributor, Black River Produce of North Springfield.
With a third partner, Richard Madigan, the trio has so far self-funded the venture and its team of six with about $1 million. After an inaugural year of carefully controlled distribution to about a dozen stores, mostly in Vermont, where they solicited customer feedback, Horner said they were ready to expand. Their store count has tripled in the past two months, and they hope for 500 regional outlets within the next year.
Black River Produce purchaser Rebecca Johnson said Real Green stood out among the many small food startups who come knocking. She highlighted its “beautiful” packaging and said products touting health benefits “are huge in the co-ops and those kinds of stores.”
Seth Walker, a category manager for the three locations of Healthy Living market, agreed that the “slick look” helps Real Green dressings sell, along with the fact that they’re fresh, made locally and can be sold beside the produce.
“Our customer base is looking for this kind of thing,” Walker said. “They check all the right boxes.”
— M.P.
Deli Delights
Mighty Mudita, mightydelislices.com
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As a public middle and high school teacher, Andrew Wild saw growing activism around the climate crisis, particularly in his students’ food choices: They wanted more options that do less harm to the planet and animals.
Wild, 42, who holds a PhD in science education, wanted those options, too — and to do work that would contribute to reducing carbon emissions. Last year, he launched Mighty Mudita, a plant-based deli slice biz. Occasionally dressed in orange and green superhero garb that matches the brand’s logo, he’s adding lower-waste, locally sourced options to the plant-based protein scene at Burlington-area grocery stores and delis.
Wild and his wife, Rachelle Gould — an associate professor in the University of Vermont’s environmental program and Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources — started making their plant-based alternatives to Tofurky and Field Roast two years ago. They wanted to avoid the plastic waste and preservatives that come with those large-scale brands.
The Burlington couple shared their DIY results with friends of all dietary preferences. The taste testers’ encouraging feedback led Wild to leave his education career at the end of the last school year to run Mighty Mudita full time.
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- Photos Courtesy Of Winter Caplanson/New England Food And Farm
- A sandwich with Mighty Mudita deli slices
Over the summer, Wild figured out how to scale up the three-pound home recipe. He wasn’t yet licensed to sell Mighty Mudita products, so he donated batches to community organizations.
When he and Gould got married in July, instead of traditional wedding gifts, the couple asked friends and family to sponsor those donations. Wild also received a $9,500 loan through the City of Burlington’s partnership with Kiva, a microlending organization.
This month, the first three Mighty Mudita deli slice products hit the shelves of area stores such as Jake’s ONE Market in eight-ounce packages. Flavors include spicy chipotle carrot ($11.99) — based on garbanzo beans and peas and free of seitan and gluten — original seitan ($9.49), and sun-dried tomato and basil seitan ($9.99). They’ll be at local farmers markets and events throughout New England this winter, and in the grocery section and available on sandwiches in the delis of both locations of City Market, Onion River Co-op starting in late January. The original seitan slices are also available as a breakfast sandwich add-on at Henry Street Deli.
“The market for plant-based proteins is growing quite a bit, so we’re super pumped that there’s somebody local doing it,” Cheray MacFarland, City Market’s director of community and marketing, told Seven Days. “And, unlike the big guys, you can explain all of the [Mighty Mudita] ingredients very easily.”
Many of those ingredients are locally sourced, including vegetables and Vermont Soy tofu. Ingredients from outside the state are mostly organic, including the vital wheat gluten used for the seitan, which is made in North America rather than from more common sources in Eastern Europe. The resulting products are lower in sodium and lack the lengthy list of preservatives found in national brands.
Mighty Mudita’s products are sold in reusable eight-ounce bags, rather than the standard 5.5-ounce packages. While it’s still plastic, Wild said, it’s thinner, representing a waste reduction of approximately 50 percent.
“I’m not attempting to imitate meat here,” Wild said, though the slices are often sold alongside it. He finds their texture satisfying in a similar way, and they’re protein rich — 18 grams per serving for the seitan, based on his rough estimate. “But it’s its own category,” he continued.
The seitan is versatile, but not as flavorful as the bean-and-pea-based slices; in addition to spicy chipotle carrot, Wild is finalizing the recipe for a smoky beet slice. He produces everything single-handedly in the commercial kitchen at Burlington Friends Meeting on North Prospect Street: 72 pounds in a seven-hour shift.
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- Photos Courtesy Of Winter Caplanson/New England Food And Farm
- Bagel with Mighty Mudita deli slices
Wild’s experience as an educator and familiarity with the scientific method came in handy as he tinkered with recipes and scaled up to launch the business. He’s on the third or fourth iteration of most of the pieces of equipment he uses. For shaping the plant-based protein into loaves, he’s moved from a hinged plumbing duct, which he bought at Lowe’s and lined with parchment, to candle forms to stainless-steel cheese molds.
But his background has been most useful in helping him deal with failure — something teachers inevitably experience as they try to meet the needs of students with different interests, advantages and disadvantages, Wild explained.
“Being able to rebound and learn from that has been helpful in dealing with challenges in the kitchen, like when a pile of bean-and-pea-based mush wasn’t fully cooked,” he said with a laugh. “I’ve been able to shrug it off and come back the next day without beating myself up too much.”
The business’ name is a double-barreled reference to joy: “Mighty” conveys a sense of happy activity, Wild said, and “mudita” is a Sanskrit word representing a state of empathetic joy. Regardless of whether Wild is wearing his orange cape as he samples and shares Mighty Mudita slices, his joy in this new path is mighty palpable.
— J.B.
