Never letting the beet drop

August 2, 2021 • Zack Andrade

Beets are so polarizing. Some people just love them, roasting them with olive oil and sea salt, slicing them into salads, mashing them with spices and folding them into ravioli. And then there are those who hate them, saying they taste like dirt. Or worse.

It’s been interesting to develop BoomVeg beet powder knowing some people love beets and some are less jazzed about them. Knowing their hesitance, we’ve done our best to make BoomVeg as palatable across the board as possible, in a number of ways.

 

What’s the best powder for the beet-curious?

We’ve spent years doing R&D on different beet varieties for the BoomVeg Beet Powder. We’ve played with Zeppo, Merlin, Solo and Raging Bull — such cool names for such a cool vegetable. Each one has different levels of betalyne, dietary nitrates, earthiness and sweetness. The season in which they’re grown affects their flavor, too. Throughout the year, we’re constantly managing those different varieties to create a consistency that customers can count on every time they grab our product.

 

Closing the loop on “waste”

It’s not just about the beets in the ground, though: it’s also about the tops. Most companies making beet powders just toss the tops away, but we’re looking for solutions for them, too. One idea is to include them as biomass in anaerobic digesters. These digest the cellulose of the biomass into gas that’s captured, scrubbed, and used to power a generator for electricity. Our goal is to harvest something commonly perceived as waste, to power processing plants, shops, offices, and anyone else on the grid. We’re committed to producing the best product on the market, but only if we can do it in a creative and ethical way.

 

Let beets be beets

Once the tops are removed, we inspect the beets and remove any foreign objects, then we truck them to a drying facility. Dehydrating produce is nothing new; it’s been a key way to preserve food going back hundreds if not thousands of years. The way we’re doing it, however, is very different. We use steam technology to evaporate the water off our beets. Does that sound counterintuitive? Think about melting chocolate in a double boiler: the steam under the bowl conducts the heat to melt the chocolate without scorching it. In our case, the water evaporates off the beets with the help of a convection fan.

Why go to these lengths to dry our beets? Steam technology allows us to retain roughly 95 percent of the beets’ original attributes: color, flavor, vitamins, minerals, and fiber. A lot of conventional turn-em-and-burn-em dehydrating facilities don’t allow for that. They’ll often strip out all the fiber and add synthetic fiber and fillers at the end because it’s faster and cheaper to produce that way. This can happen to the tune of 50 percent beets and 50 percent maltodextrin — a volume of filler that our bodies just aren’t always equipped to digest as well as the vegetables natural fiber.

 

Why does purity matter?

Digestively, when folks get 95 percent of actual beets in a beet powder, they’re getting the purest, most powerful form of the vegetable. Dietary nitrates in the beets have been shown to act as a vasodilator in the arteries. With more oxygen available through the blood, studies have shown that the body’s endurance increases and blood pressure decreases because the heart doesn’t have to pump so hard. Also, the betalynes that give beets their beautiful ruby color have been shown to suppress free radicals, which are associated with cancer. When we work with Mother Nature and keep her beets as pure as possible, we can reap their benefits, even in powder form. (In fact, for every two teaspoons of BoomVeg beets is equal to half a pound of fresh beets.)

 

How I use BoomVeg beet powder

My favorite way to consume BoomVeg beet powder is in...ice water.

Yep! I put some ice and water into a protein shaker and I mix it up with the powder. It’s like my Kool-Aid. I realize I’ve always been a straight-up veg lover my whole life, so my palate is definitely down with beet flavor. But for the consumer, we’ve really fine-tuned the flavor to appeal to the widest number of people possible.

In the end, all our decisions have been informed by our desire to make the purest and most palatable form of powders for anyone on the beet-loving/hating spectrum. BoomVeg beet powder caters to the customer who likes the vibrant color and flavor of beets, as well as the customer who likes the sweetness but not the earthiness. We can mellow all of that through beet variety, farming practices, harvesting techniques, gently drying and more.

So. Ready to eat your beets?

 

— From the Spinaca Farms blog