Chocolate as Superfood
Boise firm packs nutrients in tasty packages
Boise-based Good Superfoods is producing some downright impressive dark chocolate that company founder Paul Frantellizzi claims is really, really good for you. According to Frantellizzi and his business partner, author and doctor of naturopathy (ND) Michael T. Murphy, “superfoods” have health-promoting or disease-preventing properties and nutrients.
The Good Superfoods story started 16 years ago. Frantellizzi and his wife, Pamela Peters, fell in love with Idaho and its lifestyle after a visit to Stanley in 1998. They had been running two businesses in New York City and felt that the timing was right for them to make a change. Yet after moving to Idaho they didn’t exactly relax: Paul spent a stint as mayor of Stanley while the couple also founded Earthpure Organics and NextGen Vending, trying to move both the food service and vending industries toward healthier food.
Then, in 2009 they started Good Cacao, which they’ve recently expanded and renamed Good Superfoods, though chocolate is still their benchmark product. Why chocolate?
“Our first question was how do we create a functional food that is not only good for you,” Frantellizzi explains, “but tastes great and will be consumed en masse? Chocolate was simply the best choice. As it turns out, chocolate is also a wonderful delivery vehicle for these often difficult to use functional ingredients, such as resveratrol, green tea extract, omega-3/DHA. Chocolate has a wonderful way of masking these flavors. We took this core concept and then began developing proprietary recipes, ingredient blends and production processes that were very unique to the industry.”
When he first made the decision to move forward with his business idea, Frantellizzi knew nothing about making chocolate. He began playing around in his kitchen at home, and he began adding anything he thought would be healthy into a chocolate batch. Things like plankton, maca, astaxanthin, lutein, red palm oil and tomato extract.
“We got lucky,” he says, “because it tasted great!”
Since that time, Frantellizzi has put himself through an intense educational process, gaining a better understanding of the human body, the historical and cultural uses of many of the ingredients and the science behind food processing.
The goal with Good Superfoods, according to Frantellizzi, has always been to build a business that could lead the industry worldwide. For him that means helping as many people as possible, teaching and preaching the benefits of whole foods, ancient foods and superfoods.
“One shift for us was when we realized that we were very good at what we do with chocolate,” he says, “and that we should apply the same principles to other foods or delivery vehicles like protein bars, breakfast bars, juice blends, protein powder blends, etc. As an example, our new 20g protein bar is like no other in the industry. It is plant-based, has 20g of sprouted proteins, over 60 ingredients, prebiotics, probiotics and core functional ingredients for athletic performance. This is the space we want to be in moving forward—taking a simple protein bar and just changing the rules.”
As his business has expanded and grown, Frantellizzi has been able to magnify his operation, including his facility. Called the Superfood Innovation Center, it is now housed in a Garden City building on 1.5 acres, with 20,000 square feet of space, and a 2,500-square-foot innovation lab chock full of shiny and state-of-the-art stainless steel equipment. He’s also surrounded himself with a highly trained team including Chef Jennifer Gaudry, vice president of research and development, who is a classically trained culinary chef and a graduate of Johnson & Wales.
Frantellizzi’s Good Superfoods brand goes beyond the idea of eating organic, though their products are just that. They use non-GMO, whole food and nutrient-packed ingredients, including Ecuadorian cacao beans. They believe that eating organic, antioxidant-rich whole foods will help us all to achieve optimal physical and mental health.
“We all have the ability to heal our bodies,” Frantellizzi says, “through proper diet, exercise and good core beliefs about ourselves.”
Good Superfoods
5307 N. Glenwood St., Garden City, ID 83714
877.393.5543 • SuperfoodChocolate.com
