We are so incredibly proud and fortunate to be a finalist in the 2020 Good Food Awards! The Good Food Awards. By shining a spotlight on the taste-making crafters at the vanguard of deliciousness and social and environmental excellence, the Awards catalyzes a shift in spending towards truly good food.

JEM Organics was selected from 1,835 entries to the 10th annual Good Food Awards, these 403 products represent 42 states and have passed vetting for category-specific sustainability standards. 

We are proud to have our Cinnamon Maca Almond Butter as a finalist entry in the Confections category (after already winning in the Pantry category in 2017) well as our Coffee Cashew Almond Butter in the Pantry category. 

Being represented and recognized again by the Good Food Awards is an honor and privilege we celebrate at JEM Organics. Being presented side-by-side with other like-minded companies is evidence enough the passion and pride put into our nut butter products pays off. 

The 2020 Finalists recognized are emphasizing fairness and transparency from seed to plate, promoting safe and enjoyable working environments, and safeguarding biodiversity by creating products free of genetically modified ingredients. JEM Organics, like the other Finalists from across the 17 categories, is crafting food that is good for both consumers and the environment, favoring practices that build soil health for generations to come without the use of pesticides and herbicides.

Although the Winners won't be announced until Friday, January 17, 2020, at a 1,000 person gala in the historic San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center and the industry-only Good Food Mercantile, we are celebrating our inclusion today. We hope you'll celebrate along with us and invite all your friends and family to enjoy our ridiculously delicious nut butter creations!

            At JEM Organics, we are committed to creating intentional blends that are as nourishing as they are ridiculously delicious. While we do use three nut varieties in our products, I want to focus today on our USDA Certified Organic almonds. We all love almonds for their nutrients, antioxidants, healthy fats, and their tasty delicious crunch. However, there is more to choosing the RIGHT almond than most might think.  

            I am sure you have heard a lot about JEM Just Eat Me recently and there is a reason for it. We are creating healthy and delicious products for you that use simple, carefully sourced ingredients that address your nutrition concerns…  so you don’t have to worry.  When sourcing almonds, we specifically choose USDA Certified Organic Spanish almonds. We carefully source the finest organic almonds available and then soak, dehydrate and stone grind them to give you our unique, ultra-creamy almond butter that you have come to love!

            We insist on sourcing certified organic Spanish (Marcona) almonds for three main reasons. First, Spanish almonds have an amaretto taste to them unlike the typical California almond. This brings out a sweeter, more buttery flavor that we absolutely love! Second, the majority of almonds that are grown in the United States and used in lesser quality nut butters are required to undergo pasteurization before they can be sold and distributed. For non-organic almonds this typically means being treated with propylene oxide (yuck!). For organic almonds, this typically means roasting, blanching, or a steam treatment. JEM avoids roasted almonds as we know that the level of heat required for roasting can kill off the valuable nutrients that are inside (more on this below). Finally, organic almonds are better for our environment (pesticides are the worst!) and better for our bees (#savethebees). Therefore, we always source truly raw, USDA Certified Organic, Spanish almonds.

            Once these wonderful Spanish Marcona almonds arrive at our factory, we rinse them and then soak them in our special solution using a particular type of natural salt. This process breaks down the almond’s phytic acid shell, which allows your body to more easily absorb the essential nutrients that make almonds so good for you (yay!). After they are finished soaking, we drain them and get them ready for dehydrating, the next process step in making our ridiculously delicious almond butters.         

            Remember how I mentioned that heating the almond can kill off many valuable nutrients in the lesser nut butter brands? Well, JEM uses a USDA-approved proprietary process that heats our almonds to the point of destroying all harmful bacteria while preserving the maximum nutrient value – thus ensuring our products are super-safe for consumption as well as super-nutritious. So, JEM is neither raw nor roasted, we are the just-right in-between mix!  

            Following this step, we place almonds in our stone grinders and combine with our other high quality, nutrient dense, and certified organic ingredients to create our unique products We stone grind at slow speeds according to a fine-tuned temperature controlled process that preserves those precious nutrients and creates a finished product with the velvety texture and and taste that our fans just love. This requires us to grind our handcrafted nut butters for a long time, but that unique and special JEM taste along with preserving all those healthy nutrients is worth it to us! (Fun fact: our products are stone ground to the point of 20 microns (this is the point your tongue can no longer detect texture), giving us our unique and ultra creamy almond butter!) 

            We hope you enjoyed learning more about why we think USDA Certified Organic Spanish Marcona almonds are truly the best and why we carefully select them as the almond of choice in handcrafting our ridiculously delicious premium nut butters.  We are so thankful to you for choosing JEM’s products and being one of our loyal fans.  Stay tuned for more blogs to come as we will continue to feature stories about our carefully selected ingredients and explain more about why JEM is so much better than everything else out there.  We hope you’ll spread the word and stay with us on this beautiful and always enlightening, healthy, whole food journey that we are on!  

Try our Naked Almond Butter on toast with bananas, honey, and pollen! 

Photo by Larrisa Leitner at Bee Seasonal Honey (the best honey ever!)