For a long time our weekly shop had a rhythm to it. Someone would spot a snack worth trying, turn it over, and read out the panel. Refined seed oils. Bleached and enriched flour. A list of ingredients longer than the food had any right to need. Back on the shelf it went.
Pita chips were the one that really got us.
They are a staple in our house — the thing you actually want beside hummus, guacamole, a good dip, a wedge of cheese. Simple food that makes other simple food better. And we could not find a bag we were happy to put on the table. Not in our regular supermarket, not in the nicer one across town, not online. Every one of them came back to the same short list of problems.
Eventually it stopped feeling like bad luck and started feeling like a gap. So we made them ourselves.
Four label readers
Our three boys have been reading labels for as long as they have been reading. It began with us checking on their behalf and turned into them checking for themselves — a bag flipped over in the aisle before it goes anywhere near the cart, ingredients sounded out, a running argument about what the long words mean.
It is an odd thing to teach a child. It also works. They can spot canola oil at ten paces and they are not shy about announcing it.
Then Romi arrived, and got a brand named after her. She was four months old when this line came together — far too small for pita chips herself, but she is the reason her three brothers finally have something they can pick up without turning it over first.
Romi's Real is what we wanted on the shelf for all four of them: a short list, ingredients we can name, and nothing we would have to explain away.
That is the whole idea, and it is printed on the front of every bag so nobody else has to do the reading we did.