Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Spreading East of Sabah

The past few days and the next couple of days moving forward to the month of May has been hectic and will be even more hectic. If all goes as planned on May 2nd, 2008 our first licensee will have their soft launch of their Vedablu Shop in Tawau. The few of us are working hard now and am sure our efforts will pay off. The renovations are still on going but from the drawings and artist impression we approved, it looks really good.

Looking back, this month it will be 1 year and 6 months since our first outlet that opened in Palm Square, Kota Kinabalu. It has now come to five outlets and the new Tawau outlet. I will post an entry about the opening in Tawau in the week to come.

Friday, April 4, 2008

Zero Calorie Calorie Premium Ice Cream

Now, who wouldn't want to induldge themselves in really good ice cream without having to worry about calories?

Standing behind our Ice Cream Display Counters sometimes, I always get this common question. "How come Vedablu doesn't make zero calorie ice cream?" "I'm diabetic, what can I take?".

Let me address these questions here. No. 1 Our tagline is "fresh and natural". No. 2 I could easily produce zero calorie ice cream and put it out in the market tomorrow but I prefer not to do it because we want to honour our No. 1 rule (fresh and natural).

How to make zero calorie ice cream? Easy, replace current cane sugar in ice cream with artificial sugars. Why do Vedablu 'stubbornly' do not do this? Simply because the artificial sugars currently available in the market are aspartame or sucralose. A good web link to the side effects of these artificial sweeteners can be found here.So there it is, on one hand we can have zero calorie product but risk all the side effects mentioned. I have got some views saying that, it is the consumer who decides about their health, if they want to take aspartame, just make the product they want and give it to them. However to me, it just doesn't seem right.


Nevertheless, that does not mean that I will stop at my quest in introducing Vedablu Ice Cream with Zero Calories. Just recently, doing some research, I found an interesting sugar alternative which is all natural. It comes from the leaves of the stevia rebaudiana plant. It is funny that I never heard about this natural sugar replacement until a friend of mine mentioned about it. Then I further heard that this plant was planted vastly in Indonesia. This natural sugar alternative which originates from Paraguay has been apparently used for centuries with no known side effects. Infact it even has some additional health benefits. Read about the company in Malaysia mass manufacturing stevia here. I was so excited that I decided to blog about it here. Although I am not diabetic or on a low carbs diet, I know how hard it is to resist something sweet sometimes.

Stevia plant-Wikipedia

I shall continue to do further research on Stevia and do some product developments using this natural sugar alternative. If using Stevia in its natural state does not affect the quality and tastes of our products, who knows? Soon we shall introduce to you a few new sugar free ice cream and sorbet flavours.