February 5, 2015

Just What?

I saw this at the HUB about 2 weeks ago. That’s a giant shipment of Just Mayo. I hadn’t seen mention that we’d worked it into our menu so I emailed Chris asking when it was going to go live and he told me we’re a week into it already.

We had a ton of debate about this change to a supplier. Since Clover started we’ve been testing mayo with the hopes that we’d find an option that tastes better than Hellmann’s (or at least was a bit cheaper). We had no luck and it was really frustrating. We tried all sorts of mayonnaise and we all would look at one another and admit that the Hellmann’s tasted better.

This pained us because the Hellmann’s commercial mayo has a thousand ingredients, most of which I’d have to look up to understand. And it has a good deal of cholesterol and some other stuff that’s linked to health issues. And it’s really expensive!

Ali, who used to run our catering, brought in Just Mayo from the grocery shortly after it came out this past fall. I thought it was awesome but we had some skeptics among our group. So we followed up and blind tested. Still skeptics. So then we had Chris make the items that use mayo (e.g., potato salad) and then blind tested that. This went on for months. We finally got to a place where we could agree that even those among us with the most sensitive mouths were enjoying if not preferring the Just Mayo. This all happened in the food development meetings, which by the way, you’re invited to join (Tuesdays at 3pm at the HUB).

But there was still some discussion. So that’s why Chris released it into the wild without fanfare. He wanted to see if there were any comments or objections. Now 1 week and tens of thousands of meals into this experiment we’ve heard not a peep. That’s from a company that captures thousands of comments/ points of feedback a month.

So there it is all, you’re eating Just Mayo. And that means our mayo has fewer, higher quality ingredients (10 total). And by the way, it’s vegan. So the menu is more accessible overnight. Enjoy!

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