Let's take you back in time twenty years, to 2003. It's early days of the Internet, before Google, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, and if you wanted to learn about something you had to seek it out in person. There weren't really any raw food gurus: Gabriel Cousens had the Tree of Life Centre in Arizona, Anna Maria & Brian Clements were running Hippocrates in Florida, David Wolfe was touring the world, and that was about it. In the UK, there weren't any raw food products to buy, and raw fooders subsisted on veggies, fruits, sprouts, nuts and seeds. A classic raw food dessert was to make a "pie" with a date and almond base and then fill it with fruits like bananas and mangos. Juliano had introduced the world to raw gourmet cuisine with his book "Raw" in 2000, but the recipes were very labour intensive, and to be quite honest, didn't actually work a lot of the time. Kate's first book Eat Smart Eat Raw was the first ever raw food recipe book to come out in the UK, and Raw Living was a modest affair selling that book, juicers, tahini and Klamath Lake algae.
But in 2004, the game changed with the introduction of raw cacao. David Wolfe's company at the time, Sunfood, were the first to go to the Peruvian producers to get the raw cacao beans in their unroasted state, and Shazzie's company Detox Your World, were the first to bring them over to the UK. We would take the beans, grind them in the Vitamix with Brazil nuts and raw agave, to make a kind of nut butter, that would set when put in the fridge. This was our very first bar, the Hi-Bar, and it was sold in a few London stores including Olivers in Kew and Here in Chelsea. At the Festival of Life (the raw food festival that ran in central London for nearly a decade) in 2005, many raw-fooders got their first taste of raw chocolate, and we completely sold out that day.
From thereon, due largely to David's connections with the Peruvian farmers, we got introduced to more and more plants that revolutionised raw cuisine - ingredients like Lucuma, Mesquite, Camu Camu, Suma and Purple Corn. And this took raw foods out of the "lettuce and bananas" era of the 90s and opened up so many people to the exciting potentials of a living foods diet. In the UK, for the first time, you started to see raw food products appearing on health food store shelves, not just raw chocolate and snack bars, but granolas, crackers and kale chips. And at Raw Living, we made it our mission to seek out the best products and make our website a trusted and reliable resource for those interested in the raw foods lifestyle.
But we really owe it all to the mighty cacao bean! We would not be where we are today without it, if it hadn't sparked that wave of interest in raw foods and superfoods twenty years ago. Be The Change was one of the first bars that we created, back in 2006, and it's been in our top-sellers ever since. So we are delighted that the judges of The Great Taste Awards 2023 recognised it in this year's awards, and to celebrate we are offering 20% off all our Raw Living chocolate bars for one week only, from now until 16th August.
T&C: Discount automatically applied on site. Maximum 10 bars per customer.
Check out Raw Living chocolate bars Be The Change, Whoosh, Hi-Lovers and LuckyMe here.
