Consumers today are busy juggling their multiple responsibilities, making it hard to prepare meals at home every night. As consumers become increasingly health-conscious, they turn more and more away from fast food and toward healthier alternatives.
It’s no wonder clean label refrigerated ready-to-eat (RTE) meals are flying off the shelf. That’s why the global high-pressure processing (HPP) market is worth $14 billion, a number that’s expected to double by 2023.
Health food company Cedarlane Foods has produced natural and organic food for decades. Founder Robert Atallah grew up in Lebanon, the son of a farmer. He grew up planting and harvesting his own vegetables, fruits, and grains with his family.
“This lifestyle – and the clean way of healthy living – has always been ingrained in me,” said Atallah.
Atallah moved to Los Angeles in 1974 with a visitor’s visa and a few dollars. He worked his way through college and the food industry to found Cedarlane Foods in 1981, acting on his passion for clean, natural food.
For nearly forty years, Cedarlane Foods has developed innovative, trendsetting methods to bring healthy options to busy consumers. That’s why they adopted HPP technology to bring preservative free, RTE meals to grocery refrigerated cases and meal delivery services both nationally and internationally.
The variety and quality of refrigerated RTE meals are impressive. From breakfast wraps to tamales, burritos to salads, Cedarlane Foods offers cuisine from all over the world that’s simple, fresh, and healthy.
Cedarlane Foods and similar companies see the growing clean label trend. Consumers pay more attention than ever before to the ingredients that are in their foods. It’s important that the ingredients in a given meal are not only familiar, but the same ingredients the buyer would use if preparing the meal from scratch.
When food is HPP’d, it’s sealed into flexible packaging and then placed in highly pressurized water. Depending on what food is being processed, the pressure climbs as high as 87,000 psi, five times more pressure than the deepest part of the ocean. The immense pressure inactivates foodborne pathogens and doubles the food’s shelf life, with no need to add preservatives or cure meats. Since the process doesn’t use heat, the food maintains the same flavor, texture, and nutritional profile that it had when it was first packaged.
With the freshest ingredients and the most advanced technology, ready-to-eat, high pressure processed foods are making it easy for even the busiest consumers to stay healthy.