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Below you will find a brief summary of our conversation with Meenesh Mistry from Wholey Moly. The full episode can be listened to via Spotify, SoundCloud & Apple Podcasts.
About Meenesh and Wholey Moly
Meenesh and his wife Parul founded their start-up Wholey Moly in 2017 with the mission to prove that “healthy” is not synonymous with “boring” or “not tasty.”
Wholey Moly grew out of Meenesh’s frustration that only unhealthy, sugary snacks were available or healthy options that didn’t taste good at all.
With Wholey Moly, they wanted to create a healthy option for when you want something sweet in the afternoon that is also good for you.
Wholey Moly and JustBite share a mission: to offer a wide audience healthy alternatives to often unhealthy snacks.
What makes a healthy cookie healthy?
For Wholey Moly, it was important to understand how our body works and the impact of what we put in our mouths on our body.
First and foremost, Wholey Moly wanted to develop a product with their healthy cookies that allows us to treat ourselves to something sweet that is also good for us, without being full of refined sugars.
A second important criterion was to use only natural ingredients. For Meenesh and his wife, it felt very strange to eat ingredients that are unrecognizable or whose names we can’t even pronounce. Many traditional snacks often contain a long list of unrecognizable ingredients.
Wholey Moly cookies therefore contain only natural, unprocessed ingredients and have a low sugar content (as low as possible compared to the standard used in the food industry). But even more importantly, they taste incredibly good, because a fantastic healthy product is worthless if it doesn’t also taste delicious. Taste is probably the most important criterion to convince people to choose healthy food.
That is also why taste is one of the strict selection criteria JustBite applies to the snacks in their snack boxes.
Wholey Moly selected a number of ingredients that not only add a delicious flavor but are also incredibly good for you.
- Take, for example, cocoa, which contains 40 times more antioxidants than blueberries!
- You will also find oats in Wholey Moly cookies instead of regular flour because oats are a good energy source that also helps keep your blood sugar stable.
- The sugar content is even lower than many other snacks labeled ‘no added sugar’ thanks to date and rice syrup.
- Moreover, the cookies are gluten-free because more and more people choose to avoid gluten, even if they don’t have celiac disease. It fits into a healthy diet.
The way the cookie crumbles
Why do Wholey Moly cookies contain date and rice syrup? Because the cookies contain only natural ingredients and no preservatives or artificial ingredients, they tended to crumble easily. Therefore, a sweetener was needed that would not only provide sweetness but also act as a binder.
In traditional snacks, a whole range of artificial ingredients, such as thickeners and stabilizers, provide binding. Wholey Moly did not want this type of ingredient in their products and therefore searched for a healthy alternative that could still provide binding. People are not used to cookies that crumble easily and often don’t realize that the lack of crumbling is solely due to unhealthy additives. That is why JustBite strongly focuses on information and awareness about healthy eating.
You can already find all 3 flavors in the JustBite snack box range, and a new flavor will be added soon. Wholey Moly is working hard to continuously expand their range with new healthy snacks.
How many calories should a healthy snack contain?
The number of calories in a snack actually says nothing about whether a snack is healthy or not. The ideal number of calories per day varies greatly from person to person and depends on many factors, such as genetics or lifestyle. If you are very active throughout the day, it is normal that you need more fuel than when you sit at your desk all day.
Moreover, not all calories are the same. When the calories in your food come from empty foods that do nothing for your body, your body will not get enough fuel to function well.
If the calories, on the other hand, come from important nutrients that are valuable to your body, they will be a good source of energy and protein for your body.
An example of good, useful foods is nuts. Nuts may be higher in calories, but they provide your body with essential building blocks and are a good source of healthy fats, proteins, and energy. They also keep you feeling full longer and help keep your blood sugar stable. Moreover, each nut tastes a little different, so the flavor of your snack is always varied.
That is what a good, healthy snack should do for you: provide a tasty treat that is a good source of energy and essential nutrients without leaving you with an uncomfortable feeling or blood sugar spikes.
What’s in a name?
Where does the name Wholey Moly come from? The name is actually a fusion of “Holy Moly!” and wholesome. Holy Moly is often used in English when you are pleasantly surprised by something. People who tried Wholey Moly cookies were often pleasantly surprised by how delicious they are and the fact that they are also good for you.
Add wholesome, which is used to indicate that something is healthy and good for you, and the name Wholey Moly was born!
Conclusion
The number of calories in a snack does not necessarily determine whether the snack is healthy or not. A healthy snack always contains sufficient useful nutrients for your body and also tastes delicious. That is why JustBite strongly focuses on sharing knowledge about healthy eating and wants to teach people not to be too guided by the calorie count of snacks.