We were sitting in a bar… No, this is not a joke. We had just walked around the largest natural products expo in the country to see what was going on in the world of bars. We had been making our bar in our café, selling it only to our customers. We walked the show dreaming of being there the following year with a booth of our own.

We already had a name, The GoodOnYa Bar made sense because we were GoodOnYa deli. Although, when we started selling it to our customers, and asking them if they had tried it yet, they thought we opened a bar…… A bar with organic vodka and beer type bar. Yeah, then we would actually be making some money. You know there isn’t any money in the food business until you have serious volume. We are on our way, we want to be one of those corporations that makes so much money it has to choose charities to donate to to save on taxes. Wouldn’t that be a nice problem to have!? Who should we donate to? But I digress……

So we are sitting in the bar, at the bar, writing on a napkin. We are all fired up because we didn’t really see too many people doing what we were doing. (ok, none, but I don’t want to sound to full of ourselves) but there was literally no one with our ingredients, or even our nutritional philosophy. In a show of that size there were of course a lot of crazy products I wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole, but there were some smaller companies, truly making artisan food that was amazing. Artisana nut butters were one and we met and remain friends with them to this day.

We saw products that, in my opinion, had no business being at a “natural” products expo. Maybe some of the ingredients were ok, but it seemed more often than not that there would be 1 or 2, or 10 things in the ingredient list that weren’t good for you.