One of the best things to happen to food over the last couple decades is the move back towards natural foods. It might seem strange to imagine a time when natural foods weren’t everyone’s preference but however it happened, we’re finally starting to come out of the other side. While “natural” automatically makes us feel better about the food we put into our bodies, have you ever wondered what exactly makes natural food better than processed foods? In this blog, we will try to illuminate some of the reasons why natural foods are better, especially when we’re talking about taste.
If you’re in the mood for some delicious, natural ice cream or some decedent frozen yogurt, come to Cruz Creamery in Santa Cruz today! We use only natural ingredients in our frozen yogurts and ice cream because they just plain taste better and because it’s better for the environment to use natural ingredients.
Better Ingredients Means Better Flavors
If you’re old enough to remember how fresh, natural food used to taste, you probably remember a point in time when things just started to taste different. Over the last 50 or 60 years, artificial flavorings have dominated the market. Why is that, you ask? There are several factors at play, the most important of which is cost. Artificial flavorings can usually be produced for a fraction of the cost of real flavors.
They also take much less time to produce in large enough quantities to keep up with demand. In the old days, some flavors like vanilla and chocolate were extremely time-consuming and costly to harvest and make into usable flavors. Natural flavors are also largely dependent on seasons of growth and are grown in faraway corners of the world. When you factor in how much time it takes for vanilla or cacao to grow, add the time it takes to harvest and process it, and then ship it to the United States, it can seem incredible that we were ever able to enjoy these flavors more than once or twice every few years.
In order to meet the public’s demand for these flavors, companies began to experiment with food additives that got close enough to the original flavors. While people might not have liked them as much as the natural flavors, they were much cheaper and much easier to get. While these flavorings have been deemed same, they don’t taste the way the natural flavors do.
Natural Ingredients Are Better for Us and for Animals
We take the time to select our ingredients carefully. We choose to work with farmers who treat their cows right because we believe that happier, healthier cows provide better milk. We’d be willing to bet that in a blind taste test a large majority of people would choose milk and ice cream that came from cows who were treated humanely better than the milk that came from cows who are locked in pens their entire lives and fed hormones to increase their milk yields and antibiotics to keep them healthy enough to keep pumping out milk at a ridiculous rate. When we treat cows right they reward us with better-tasting milk which means better tasting ice cream and frozen yogurt for all of us!
As you can see, here at Cruz Creamery, we take ice cream seriously. We rely on the world’s best, natural flavors and milk from happy cows to bring you the best frozen yogurts and ice creams in Santa Cruz. Once you come in and taste the difference, there’s no going back! We can’t wait to see you at our ice cream shop soon! Give us a call if you have any questions!
