Goodbye, Hello!
/By Laura and Jess
2/25/19
First and foremost, we want to thank each and every one of you for your continued support! Whether you follow us on social media and share our posts or have donated to our foundation, we appreciate you! You probably know by now that as of 2019 we decided to close the Keto Hope Bakery. We know a lot of you were sad about this decision as you loved our tasty treats so we wanted to give you a little insight into our thought process.
The team at Keto Hope is heading in a new direction. But before I go into this new direction, let’s back up a bit and talk about why we started the bakery. Four years ago when the original team at Keto Hope sat down and started talking about missing links and gaps in the ketogenic diet community the one concept we kept coming back to was there were no easy, ready-to-go, convenient snack products. So to fill this huge need we went to work testing dozens and dozens of recipes and came up with the cheddar cracker, bread mix and the vanilla cookie. For a few years our products were pretty much alone in the market place but then something changed. The marketplace for ketogenic products EXPLODED. If you do a quick Amazon search, hundreds of ketogenic friendly snacks are available (in fact 925 suggestions to be exact). Our small little bakery just couldn’t compete with these big corporations.
Over the past two years the ketogenic diet has become a very popular “fad diet” promoted by celebrities and touted to help with anything from weight loss to chronic pain. This is not entirely different than what happened with the gluten free community several years ago. Gluten free originally was designed for people with Celiac disease and few products were available in the grocery stores or on-line. Then it became a “fad diet” and BAM…thousands of products and the term “gluten free” can probably be found in several products in your pantry right now. So since ketogenic diets have gained popularity, the consumer demand for keto friendly products have skyrocketed and the food industry has responded by bringing hundreds of new products to the market place.
Therefore, with some sadness but mainly excitement about new future opportunities, we chose to shut down the bakery.We felt that we could use our expertise and knowledge in a different way to serve the epilepsy community.
New Directions
We still have the Keto Friends initiative that pairs up keto diet newbies to a knowledgeable support person. Jess is working hard to reorganize this in a way that is more “user-friendly” and can better serve the needs of families. We also have the Keto Education initiative where we offer webinars for Registered Dietitians to learn more about the ketogenic diet for epilepsy and other neurological disease states. So far we have hosted 3 webinars:
· Use of the Ketogenic Diet in the NICU: Safety and Tolerability by Lindsey Thompson MS, RD, CSP, LD at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City.
· Ketogenic Diets and Medications by Eric H. Kossoff, MD at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD.
· Ketogenic Diets and Cancer by Denise Potter RD, CSP, CDE with Potter Dietitian Consulting, LLC.
We are super excited to be releasing a new webinar soon that is geared towards patients and their caregivers. For this webinar, we dig deep into the realities of life on a ketogenic diet by interviewing the Rushton family from Indiana who have a son, Xavier, following a modified Atkins diet (MAD) for epilepsy. The webinar features Xavier himself giving tips and tricks on how to be successful on such a restricted diet. Look for more information about this webinar in a future blog post!
In addition we are starting this blog in hopes that it will be a great resource for ketogenic product suggestions and reviews. Now that there are hundreds of products that are deemed “keto” how do you know if they are appropriate for someone on a ketogenic diet for epilepsy versus someone using the diet to lose weight (which may be very different)? One of our goals is to provide unbiased opinions about keto products to help ease your burden of endless hours of google searching or buying products that end up tasting like cardboard. We are going to taste these products (both our adult and kiddo team members are on our tasting panel), analyze their nutrient profiles and let you know what we honestly think! Is it worth your money? Is it truly ketogenic friendly? A few topics we are currently working on:
· Top Ten Keto Snacks for On-The-Go
· Top 5 Keto Shakes
· Keto Friendly Dips and Sauces
But remember we are here for you!If you want us to review a product or you have a good suggestion for a topic, we would love to hear it!In addition, if you are reading this and are a manufacturer of a ketogenic product – we would love to try it and post a review of it! Challenge accepted?
