Chip Off the New Block
"Food Should Taste Good" is a funny name for a tortilla chip. And you don't often think of olive, sweet potato or jalapeno as classic tortilla chip flavors. But natural food lovers have come to realize that Food Should Taste Good makes one of the best tortilla chips on the market – because, in the end, it's what inside that counts, and this unusual company actually cooks its flavors inside the chips instead of just layering them on top.
With the enormous growth of the natural foods industry in the last few years, a lot of entrepreneurs have tried to break into the business. And they've attempted just about everything: from shaping tofu to look like turkeys, to mass producing grandma's secret pasta sauce recipe. There have been all kinds of green tea products, hundreds of new nutrition bars, and plenty of knock-offs of conventional food legends like Oreos and Cheerios and Pop Tarts. A few have succeeded, but most have gone down in obscurity.
Enter one Pete Lescoe, a 30-something Massachusetts entrepreneur who had worked in grocery stores and restaurants since high school. Not that the world needed another tortilla chip, but Pete's idea was a little different: instead of dusting the surface of a chip with chili-lime or mesquite, what if you actually incorporated the flavoring into the dough itself?
Further shunning the Doritos model, Pete also wanted to make sure that his chips were made only with high-quality, healthful ingredients. So, in addition to his unique flavorings, he also "baked into the concept" the requirement that his chips be gluten-free, cholesterol-free, and trans fat-free, as well as certified Kosher, low in sodium, high in dietary fiber, and made without genetically modified ingredients (GMOs). Noble goals...but only so long as the flavor came through. Food, after all, should taste good.
The first chip FSTG flavor launched in 2006 was the multigrain (it is still the bestseller at Sprouts). But on its heels came a series of unique flavors, such as sweet potato and olive.
Fast forward to the present. Lescoe's creation, Food Should Taste Good chips, have become a staple on the shelves at Sprouts and other food stores, and have attracted a lot of attention from the media – everything from Oprah to The Today Show to Martha Stewart Living (check out their gallery of press clips. And they have won plenty of awards, including "Best Tortilla Chip" by Fitness Magazine and Men's Health (2009).
The next time you've got a hankering for something crisp and flavorful, try out Pete Lescoe's products for yourself.
from the July, 2010 edition of Fresh Off the Press
