One of the reasons we started Modmarket is b/c I believe 100% in the healing power of foods.  Eating the right food is like putting high octane gas in your car, it just makes the system work better.  Everyday I read new books (like this one) or hear things like what is described in this AWESOME TED talk.  Do yourself a favor, take 5 minutes and watch it.  And if you don’t believe what he is saying, all you have to do is come eat salads at Modmarket everyday for a month and then examine how you feel (hint: you will feel A LOT better).

While I love a good burger as much as the next guy (especially a Wasabi Tuna Burger from here), I find it odd that so many people think that b/c a burger and fries is served up in a ‘cool’ environment, it is a lot healthier for them than eating at McDonald’s.  Bottom line is that while burgers and fries, even the healthiest varieties, are nice treats, they are not something you should be eating on a daily basis.  An interesting study just came out furthering that case – apparently people who ate a high fat meal had higher rates of airway inflammation (read: asthma) and responded poorly to asthma medication versus peeps who ate a low fat meal.  More proof that what you eat is directly tied to your overall health, not just your waistline.  There is a growing body of research that suggests that eating foods that lower your inflammation levels (see also:  food served at Modmarket) is one of the best ways to improve your health, so maybe focus on making that burger and fries a treat rather than a weekly occurrence!

Those of you who have been eating at Modmarket since day 1 may have noticed an interested phenomena as of late.  Lines, especially at lunch time.  When we started, we were busy, but never really slammed and we were able to keep service times exactly where we wanted them.  As things picked up we kept tweaking things so that we could keep up with the higher customer counts.  But over the last month, things have really ramped up and at times, our old way of doing things has resulted in some LONG lines (out the door on numerous occasions).  Don’t worry though, we are working on a variety of solutions that will hopefully make the line move much faster!  And if you are short on time, you may want to consider just calling in your order – we can have it ready for you, and you can skip the line, pick up your order and be out of the store in just a minute or two!

So Rob found this cool recipe for a passion fruit vinaigrette dressing that tasted pretty good.  One of the key ingredients was frozen passion fruit concentrate.  We use orange juice concentrate in one of our dressings and it contains, as one would expect, concentrate from oranges and nothing else.  After we made a sample of the passion fruit dressing, I was tossing the container it came in and happened upon the ingredient list.  Guess what else is in the pack besides passion fruit?  How about my least favorite sweetener in the entire world, high fructose corn syrup!  Why on earth does this juice need this?  Passion fruit is a fairly sweet fruit and its natural flavor is awesome.  Why do food companies feel so compelled to add sweetener to everything, even things that area already sweet?  Oh wait, I know, because corn is subsidized by the government and corn syrup is a lot cheaper than actual fruit juice.  So annoying.  I am sure there are people are buying this juice concentrate for their kids thinking they are getting them some healthy ‘juice’, when in reality, they are just serving up the equivalent of non-carbonated soda.  What is even more insane is that we have searched high and low and we cannot find a company out there that makes frozen passion fruit juice without adding sugar.  Unbelievable.  Guess we will have to find a fruit base for this dressing!

Some of you may have noticed that we ran out of pepperoni last week.  Sorry about that.  Someone wrote a review online and was super critical of us saying they couldn’t believe a pizza place would run out of pepperoni.  Figured I would explain why.  I can get pepperoni from any of the distributors that we buy food from.  I can only get all natural, nitrate free pepperoni from one of them.  It is a special order item and therefore not always in stock.  And because we don’t have a ton of excess freezer space to store it in, we can only order small amounts at any given time.  So long story short, we had a busy week, burned through all of our pepperoni and the special order was delayed in coming in.  When we ran out, we could have substituted the nasty, nitrate loaded type that is served at 99.999% of other pizza places.  Our other distributors would have loved to sell it to us.   Instead, we chose to be out of it for a few days and wait for the stuff we wanted.  Putting things like nitrate free pepperoni on our menu is the right thing to do from a sustainability standpoint but a very tough one to do from a business standpoint.  It is the reason why very few people do it.  I am more than willing to run out of something for a few days, have a few customers be miffed but stand by our standards rather than lower our standards just so we can keep one item on our menu 100% of the time.  Making substitutions on things like this is a slippery slope and I prefer to avoid it all together.  Same thing with our ginger ale….

we ran out two weeks ago, and Boylan’s is having trouble getting us some more.  It totally stinks that we have not had it for two weeks now, and if we were serving up beverages from Coke or Pepsi, this problem would never come up.  This is why 99.9999% of restaurants have Coke or Pepsi on tap.  They make it ridiculously easy  for the business owner.  You run out, you call a number and SNAP, an hour later you are completely restocked.  We wanted an all natural soda sweetened with cane sugar.  There are very few companies that offer this on tap.  We are using Boylan’s, a tiny company out of New Jersey that has been around for a hundred years or so.  Ordering soda from them is an incredibly complicated process because they don’t have distribution in this part of the country.  But we are sucking it up, doing the extra legwork and getting it shipped to our store.  Occasionally, there will be a run on a certain flavor and we are out of it for a few days.  There really isn’t anything we can do about it, it is part of beingn a small store a long way away from our supplier.  Just because things like this happen, does that mean we should cave in and take the ‘easy’ route and offer up Coke and Pepsi products?  No way!  We started Modmarket b/c we HATED how most other restaurants and chains operated.  We knew doing things our way would be difficult.  But that is precisely why we need to do them.  If no one ever does the extra work and markets products and services they truly believe in, how will change ever occur??

So for the last two Wednesday’s we have experimented with a pretty crazy happy hour offer, 10 bucks for a bottle of Barefoot Wine (Cab or Pinot Grigio) and one of our awesome M’Rita pizzas.  This has to be one of the best happy hour deals of all time and, as such, it was very well received.  Only hiccup was that we had a bunch of peeps email us saying that they were bummed b/c they were unable to make the Wednesdays.  We are solving this problem by running the happy hour Monday, Tuesday AND Wednesday this week,  3pm to 6pm.  And for gluten intolerant folks out there, you can make the deal gluten free for an extra 3 bucks!  Fair warning though, we have a finite storage capacity in the store for wine, so if we run out before Wednesday, we might have to amend the offer a bit!

This is pretty cool, a medical study at Colombia university in NYC has concluded that eating more leafy greens, fruits and veggies (sounds suspiciously like the type of food we serve at Modmarket) puts people at a lower risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease.   It is amazing how every month, we see more and more articles supporting the fact that a plant dominant diet is the best thing for maintaining your bodies health.  You can read the article here.

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You just can’t make stuff like this up.  KFC has decided to make a ’sandwich’ where the bun is replaced with fried chicken.  Awesome.  I wonder if we will ever have a customer who thinks ‘hmmm, what should I eat today, the KFC double down or a Market salad from Modmarket?’  I am pretty sure there is not a lot of crossover between our customers

So yesterday I spent about 3 hours touring around Munson Farms in Boulder.  We are going to be buying a lot of produce from them throughout the summer and Bob Munson was nice enough to drive me around all the fields, show me where they were planting what, etc.  It was a lot of fun plus I got the added benefit of seeing the beginnings of their spring crop start to poke through the winter hardened soil.  Those little green shoots in the pic above will eventually turn into super tasty, locally grown lettuce.  How cool is that?  There is about a two month window when we will be able to get lettuces from Munson and during that time, we will have greens in our salads at the Farmers Market that were cut THAT DAY.  If you ordered a salad at 11am, the lettuce in it could be less than 3 hours from harvesting.  This is a new kind of ‘fast food’.  Our food is going as quickly as possible from the farm to your plate!  I only wish Colorado’s growing season was longer so we could do stuff like this all year around!

So we are starting to offer some brownies for sale.  We have always intended to have some ’sweet’ options and we have experimented with a few things, but none of them stuck.  The brownies are cool b/c they are easy to make, have a pretty clean recipe (no preservatives or anything) AND they taste great.  I have always felt that coffee shops, restaurants, etc have gone WAY overboard on the size of the sweet treats that they serve.  I have never met anyone who feels good after eating a 4″ square brownie, yet, that is what everyone seems to serve.  We are taking a different approach.  Our brownies are small, maybe 1.5″ by 1.5″ and each one is around 100 calories.  They are less than a buck each.  If you don’t think one will be enough, buy two.  This way, people like me who hate large desserts can get the little sweet snack they want without feeling wasteful and people who just HAVE TO HAVE a big brownie can buy two, or three, or four.  We won’t stop you, I promise.