January 26, 2010

Pita

As you all know our pita is very important to us. We use it for every single sandwich. If we couldn’t deliver this quality of pita we would be serving Clover sandwiches on bread or something else.

When we first got started I spent a lot of time and money trying to get a local baker to make the bread we wanted. I talked to bakers and ran large custom runs at some of the local bakeries (including Iggys, Near East). We just couldn’t achieve what we were looking for. We tried importing a bread from Montreal for a while that others raved about. It just wasn’t there. People told me that Rami’s in Brookline flies bread in from Israel. I’m not sure whether this is true, but it wasn’t something we’d ever do. We get our bread from Brooklyn, and that’s far enough.

Nutritionally our bread is quite different from Pita you might find in a grocery store. For one it’s whole wheat. This helps make our sandwiches more filling, and it provides you with a bunch of micronutrients and good fiber. Because they are fresh and we don’t hold them at all our bread has no preservatives. It’s also low on fat since we don’t need to use fat to make it feel moist in a grocery store. And our bread is also relatively high in protein. It’s small, so our calorie count is on the low side. Here is the summary:

EDIT: Chris, one of our longtime employees and a nutritionist, says he thinks our Pita supplier is playing games with these numbers, as most companies do. Eager to make their nutritionals look “good” folks play with the serving size number. Chris thinks our pita are on average something more like 3.5 oz per pita (not the 2.5 oz per pita listed above). You know, candy bars that are only 200 calories, but contain 3 servings in the bar. We’ll reflect this going forward. Thanks Chris for keeping this process honest.

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