Non-GMO Month Prize Giveaway!

By: Allison Carpenter, Community Outreach

Hello everyone.

We are excited to announce that in celebration of Non-GMO month, we are giving away three Berryvale tote bags loaded with Non-GMO Verified goodies!

October is the month of fun; parties and treats in celebration of Fall and the October holidays! We will be doing a drawing on October 26^th where we will pick 3 winners to receive one of these treat filled totes.

The tote bags themselves are a great prize! High quality cotton canvas totes with the Berryvale logo. Great for grocery shopping or as a tote bag for whatever your needs are. These bags are eco-friendly and made from recycled cotton canvas from Ecosbags, a fair wage, fair labor company.

Inside the bags you’ll find a lot of goodies perfect to bring to any party!

 How to enter:

To enter to win: Head on over to Facebook and like our page, and then leave a comment on the raffle post about your favorite Non-GMO Verified product. Or you can come on into Berryvale and enter in store by filling out an entry form slip and putting it in the Official Entry Box on our Non-GMO end cap. Promotion ends October 26^th at 12pm. At this time, we will hold a drawing including all of the names of the participants on Facebook and in store. Be sure to check on Facebook, where we will post the winner. Facebook winners will be contacted via messaging, and in store entrants will be contacted via phone or email. Be certain to check out the official entry rules below!

Non-GMO Month October!

By: Allison Carpenter, Community Outreach

October is Non-GMO month! What’s Non-GMO month you ask? Non-GMO month is a campaign that was launched in 2010 by the Non-GMO Project in order to spread wider awareness of the Non-GMO Project, concerns of GMOs and the efforts of individuals and groups on right to know legislation, and legislation that could take away our right to know.

According to Non-GMO project:  “Every October, Non-GMO Month provides a powerful opportunity to coordinate our voices and our actions. Across North America brands, retailers and individuals stand up for our right to know what’s in our food, and to choose non-GMO.”
 

We use the phrase “Look for the Butterfly”. If you see the Non-GMO logo—epitomized by an orange Butterfly—on a product in store, you can trust that the product has passed a stringent and highly detailed testing and verification process:

From the Non-GMO Project Website:

What does “Non-GMO Project Verified seal” mean?

The verification seal indicates that the product bearing the seal has gone through our verification process. Our verification is an assurance that a product has been produced according to consensus-based best practices for GMO avoidance:

• We require ongoing testing of all at-risk ingredients—any ingredient being grown commercially in GMO form must be tested prior to use in a verified product.
• We use an Action Threshold of 0.9%. This is in alignment with laws in the European Union (where any product containing more than 0.9% GMO must be labeled). Absence of all GMOs is the target for all Non-GMO Project Standard compliant products. Continuous improvement practices toward achieving this goal must be part of the Participant’s quality management systems.
• After the test, we require rigorous traceability and segregation practices to be followed in order to ensure ingredient integrity through to the finished product.
•  For low-risk ingredients, we conduct a thorough review of ingredient specification sheets to determine absence of GMO risk.
• Verification is maintained through an annual audit, along with onsite inspections for high-risk products.

      Want to know more about Non-GMO month? Visit the Non-GMO month website, or come into Berryvale and pick up our informational materials located on our magazine rack near the cafe. We’ll be there to greet you and answer questions you have about Non-GMO verified products. We’ll also have featured Non-GMO verified products throughout the month, and tote bag giveaways stuffed with goodies! Don’t miss it!

Stay tuned for more blogs and social media posts about Non-GMO and the Non-GMO Project!

Reopening and New Store Shelving!

By Allison Carpenter; Community Outreach

Hello everyone! Well, it’s the BIG day! Our reopening after being closed for a whole day! Did you miss us?

We missed you! We are so happy to share with you all these beautiful updates that our crew worked so hard to bring together. What better way to tell the story than with photos:

First, we had to remove all of the products off of our shelves.

After this, we disassembled the old shelves and deep cleaned our floors. Surprise, Surprise! Rolaids? When have we ever sold Rolaids?

Next, we assembled the new shelves and placed them on the floor. 

Then, we diligently gave the store a good deep clean. Employees from each department went to work removing product. Everything from produce to the café was scrubbed and polished.

We’re almost done! Our next step was reorganizing the shelves with the help of our supplier, UNFI, who guided us on product placement. These professionals really know how to organize a grocery store!

And finally, we put everything back in place, replaced our old signage and shelf tags, and put on all the finishing touches.

And that’s it! We hope you enjoy our new look and layout! Let us know what you think and don’t be shy about asking our staff where to find your favorite foods and brands!

Cafe: BV Rueben and Local Sauerkraut from Salt and Savour

By Allison Carpenter; Community Outreach

Hi all! We hope you are enjoying the last bit of summer. It really seems like summer has flown by!

This week in the Deli, we’d like to highlight one of our most popular sandwiches; the Berryvale Rueben. This delicious sandwich is made with grilled turkey pastrami or tempeh, swiss cheese, tomato, red onions, lettuce, and Russian dressing. Finally it is topped with some tasty and gut healthy sauerkraut. You can have this sandwich made on our marbled rye bread, or if you are gluten sensitive, you can try out our delicious gluten-free multigrain bread made by Organicos. This sandwich is grilled and served warm.

Photo from Salt and Savour Facebook Page.

The sauerkraut on this sandwich comes from one of our local brands, Salt and Savour. Salt and Savour makes a special batch just for Berryvale that does not have any of the added flavors they include in their packaged sauerkraut, making it universally appealing to sauerkraut lovers.

Salt and Savour is locally owned and operated in beautiful Dunsmuir, California. Their sauerkraut is traditionally fermented and produced in small batches. In their packaged sauerkraut, available for sell in our refrigerated section, they add unique blends of flavors to their batches, including red cabbage and ginger, caraway, and horseradish and mustard seed. We have received very positive feedback about this sauerkraut, which is just one of the many reasons we feature it on our Berryvale Rueben!

So if you’re around and craving a hearty gut healthy sandwich, stop by our café and order a Rueben while supporting a great local business on the rise! Or, check out the variety of sauerkrauts from Salt Savour in our Chill department and try the different flavors for yourself!

Photo from Salt and Savour Facebook Page

Thanks for stopping by our blog and let us know what you think about this Rueben in the comments below!

For more information on Salt and Savour, you can visit their website here: www.saltandsavour.com

Berryvale Closing Early Sept 8th and Closed Sept 9th for Store Updates!!!

Hi everyone,

We hope your week is going well. We have some exciting news! Next week, Berryvale will be closed Sept 9th, but when you come back in on Thursday, you will be greeted with beautiful new shelving.

In order to get the new shelves in, we will be closing early on Sept 8th. at 6:00 PM. The cafe will close early at 4:00 PM, as will the dining room. The dining room needs to be cleared out by exactly 4:00 PM in order for us to initiate our updates.

The cafe, however, will still be taking to go, out of case, orders until 6:00 PM.

On Sept 9th, our store will be closed all day. We will resume normal business hours once our store updates are finished.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you and ask that you make proper preparations in advance to prepare for our closure. Thank you for understanding and we look forward to sharing our new updates with you! We will make sure to take lots of pictures when the updates are all finished!

Thank you!

The Berryvale Team

September Coffee News

Weed Coffee Roasting Demo

Hi all! We’re excited to announce that on Thursday, September 3^rd from 8-11 am, Weed Coffee Roasters will be here sharing several of their roasts with us. This is a chance to try their coffee for free and get to know the owners, Mary and Scott. They will be handing out fresh samples of their Sisq Cowboy and Sumatran blends. They will be set up between the two registers near the front of the store.

Weed Coffee Roasting is locally owned in Weed, Ca. Their coffees are made in small batches and are organic.

Café Coffee Rotation

In the Café, we are having our premium organic coffees rotating on different days. Mondays and Tuesdays will feature Peace Coffee, Wednesdays and Thursdays its Weed Coffee Roasting, and Friday-Sunday we’ll be offering locally made Northbound. We’ll have available on each day a dark roast and a medium roast from the same coffee brands.

Café News: Organicos Gluten Free Bread

By Allison Carpenter; Community Outreach

If you’re like many Americans, you enjoy a good sandwich. Sandwiches in and of themselves are the epitome of the American lunch. But if you find yourself sensitive to gluten or have celiac disease, than a sandwich might just be out of the question. Sure, many brands have tried to create the perfect gluten free bread, but more often than not we wind up disappointed with the flavor and texture. Opening yourself up to pay that often $10 or more price tag for a loaf of bread you might just hate lowers the incentive to gamble and try another brand that claims to have gotten it right, leaving you without a piece of bread for your sandwich and making it, well, not a sandwich.

At the Berryvale Café, they have been trying to crack this code for a while. After trying and tasting bread after bread, they’ve finally figured it out! The Berryvale Cafe is excited to introduce a truly delicious gluten free bread alternative; Organicos Multi-grain Bread. Speaking as a person that is very sensitive to gluten, I have had to avoid the café; every time I’d walk by, I’d smell the delicious smell of sandwiches grilling and my taste buds would cry a little.  

Today, I was prompted by our cafe manager, Jennifer, to try the bread on a sandwich. She told me I wouldn’t regret it. So I took the plunge and gave it a try and I didn’t! I did the “build your own sandwich” and ordered a grilled turkey sandwich with avocado, lettuce, tomato, onion, and veganaise. The taste and flavor was perfect! I could hardly tell I wasn’t eating the real deal. There was a slight flavor to the bread that is not found in regular sandwich bread that I found very hearty and savory. It has a real robust, wheat-bread-like texture that is unlike any gluten free bread I have ever tasted and paired perfectly with the grilled turkey and avocado. Normally with gluten free bread, the bread dissolves in the mouth and lacks the porous, grainy texture of regular bread, but not Organicos. I can only attribute this to Organicos’ explanation that it “derives its old world texture and dark coloration from the addition of buckwheat flour and black strap molasses.” This multi-grain bread does not fall short of its name.

This bread is topped with some yummy seeds that add to the bread’s robust flavor while not taking away from its bread-like texture, as many regular seeded breads do. Indeed, this bread surpassed all expectations I had. On top of that, this bread is vegan—egg and dairy free—making it an overall win win! And now, best of all, I no longer have to dodge the delicious café smells of grilled sandwiches while working my shift.

If you have a gluten sensitivity or celiacs, or are just avoiding gluten for other reasons, I highly recommend this scrumptious bread! Try it on our many delicious sandwiches; the Grilled Turkey Pesto, the Berryvale Rueben, the Tuna Melt, Grilled Cheese, Cold Tuna, or the Veggie Sandwich. Or you could build your own sandwich for a truly unique sandwich experience. Just be sure that when you order your sandwich, you request the gluten free bread option. It only costs $.50 extra and is well worth it!