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Creative Gluten-Free Cereal Names & A Chance To Win

Happy Friday everyone! It looks as if Spring has finally arrived for good in North Carolina, so I will definitely spend the majority of the weekend outside. Do you have any great weekend plans?

But first things first. It’s become a tradition that’s dear to my heart that we at Custom Choice Cereal recognize the creative names for your gluten-free cereal on the last day of the work week. Maybe you made it this week! Even if not – at the very least you can snap up some ideas what you might call your next mix. This week’s contestants are:

5. Hajo’s Breakfast Surprise (mix ID fd9830). I’m honored!
4. CCCereal (mix ID 8d21f6). Just because.
3. PinkFlash Race Mix (mix ID c812c7). Certainly hope you won/will win your race :-)
2. Elizabeth’s Awesome Blend (mix ID 74b640). Couldn’t possibly agree more.
1. And our winner is Chocolatey granola blast (mix ID b4b871). Guaranteed to give you an energetic start into the day!

I hope you have a wonderful weekend! Remember: If you upload a picture of yourself with your personal gluten-free cereal to Custom Choice Cereal’s facebook page, you can win 2 free replacements of your last order! We’ll select the winner at the end of April!

Custom Choice Cereal In Local Newspaper

Hajo, Custom Choice CerealWhat a weekend and start into the new week this has been! I am excited that on Sunday, the Durham Herald-Sun featured an article about Custom Choice Cereal and our custom gluten-free cereal. For me as a small local entrepreneur, it is always a great feeling to be written about!

Author Keith Upchurch actually has celiac disease, which I thought was a very interesting coincidence. He had not previously heard of us and really liked our concept. This being said, the reason why he wrote his article was because of our recent partnership with gourmet retailer Dean & DeLuca in New York City.

But I don’t want to repeat everything from the article about Custom Choice Cereal. Instead, I encourage you to check it out! I’m just thrilled to have a newspaper write about my little gluten-free company and help at least one more person on a gluten-free diet enjoy a variety of tasty breakfast again!

Gluten-free fair season: upcoming events

Finding gluten-free food that tastes good is still a challenge in many areas. That’s part of the reason why we came up with Custom Choice Cereal – providing a fun gluten-free experience! If you are interested in finding out more about how our custom gluten-free cereal came to life you are invited to read our story.

Now that the summer break is coming to an end, there are a few gluten-free food shows and and vendor fairs coming up over the next two months. These are great events to find out about anything gluten-free. While I like food events of any kinds (every rule has an exception, mine is fish), these fairs are super helpful if you have celiac disease or a gluten sensitivity.

I am sure we have overlooked one or the other event, so please feel free to add to the list in the comment section. We at Custom Choice Cereal (and I am sure everyone else) appreciate your help!

Gluten-free cereal makes you creative…

Aaaand another week has passed, time at Custom Choice Cereal just flies by! To a large part that is because you keep us busy and entertained. Thank you for that!

Those of you who have not yet created their personal gluten-free online are probably wondering why I say that you keep us entertained. It’s because Custom Choice Cereal allows you to even name your ‘cerealization’! It is both fun and entertaining for us to read how create you can get, and that’s why we share a selection of creative gluten-free cereal names every Friday. This week’s top names are

5. Stones Special Blueberry Granola (Everything we have is special!)
4. Yum…mine (That’s right!)
3. Mmmmmmmmuseli (mmmmm – delicious…)
2. We have a tie! Stranana Nack Attack and wowzers!
1. And this week’s winner Giddy Up Darlin’ GF Grub (mix ID 352fc8)

Thank you for being such great customers and enjoy your weekend!

Gluten-free foods and contamination

The gluten-free diet has many challenges – constant studying of ingredients labels and searching for words such as “barley malt” or “brewer’s yeast” that make you put the item in question right back on the shelf is just one of them. In order to make things a little bit easier for you, we at Custom Choice Cereal have therefore collected a few tips & tricks on how to master your gluten-free life.

Your safety is our highest priority! That’s why it has been our policy to test all of our naturally gluten-free ingredients for potential cross-contamination with gluten before they enter our facility. Our test is accurate to 10 parts per million (ppm) and thus twice as strict as the FDA’s proposed contamination threshold of 20ppm.

It turns out that it was wise to implement this safety measure. Researchers analyzed 22 naturally gluten-free grains, seeds, and flours available on supermarket shelves that were not specifically labeled gluten-free. The tests revealed shocking results:

  • Almost a third (seven) products would have failed the FDA test
  • One product (soy flour) contained >3,000 ppm of gluten

Tricia Thompson, nutrition consultant and lead author of the study, admits that the sample was too small to make people with celiac disease especially wary. However, it shows that it is unfortunately not safe to assume that an item can be consumed safely just because no gluten-containing ingredient can be found on the label.

Custom Choice Cereal behind the scenes

Have you ever wanted to see what Custom Choice Cereal’s dedicated gluten-free facility looks like? Do you want to know how your custom gluten-free cereal mixes are created? Here is a chance to watch me in action as seen on Fox8 Greensboro’s segment called Made in North Carolina. Enjoy!

 

Custom Choice Cereal fuels Type1Rider

Back in May Chris and I had the opportunity to meet Tony Cervati, a type 1 diabetic and avid cyclist. We wrote about the Type1Rider’s amazing story because his energy and motivation truly impressed us.
Type1Rider in actionTony founded Type1Rider in order to raise awareness and educate about diabetes while at the same time providing support and encouragement to those who have diabetes.

Chris and I were so captivated by his drive and mission that we decided to sponsor Tony with his personal gluten-free Custom Choice Cereal. This was just the logical thing for us to do, especially after we had learned about the connection between celiac disease and type 1 diabetes in January.

Tony told us that he had a great time cerealizing his mixes and really liked that the automatically updating nutrition label provided great guidance for him. Stay tuned as we keep you posted about Tony’s feedback!

In the meantime you can of course design your own gluten-free cereal. What is your favorite ingredient for the summer?

Celiac disease vs. gluten intolerance

When I delivered the special gluten-free cereal mixes that we at Custom Choice Cereal donated to the gluten-free week at Camp Kanata I had the pleasure of meeting Cynthia Kupper. Cynthia is the Executive Director of the Gluten Intolerance Group (GIG), a great resource on anything related to gluten.

Since I have often been asked about the difference between celiac disease, gluten intolerance, and a ‘gluten allergy’. First of all the latter actually does not exist. The key difference is that allergies can be immediately fatal while celiac disease and intolerances are not (though research indicates a higher mortality rate for long-term untreated celiacs). But enough said, I let Cynthia explain the differences in much more detail in the video below. Enjoy!

If you have any further questions, our next Q&A with Dr. Stephen Wangen is coming up on July 7th. Don’t miss this great chance to ask a renown expert anything you’ve always wanted to know about celiac disease and living gluten-free!

Names for gluten-free cereal concoctions

Another week has passed, and thanks to you we were again delighted to see many creative names for the gluten-free cereal mixes you created. Since I have been asked to keep these blog entries short I get straight to Custom Choice Cereal’s top 5 names for this week:

5. Cheraple Chomps (Now that’s what we call creativity!)
4. Tropical Monkey Mix (Sometimes I feel like a monkey, too…)
3. GF Yum Yum Mix (Because gluten-free should be yum yum!)
2. Wookie Wonder Food (Love this name!)
1. And the winner THIS IS AMERICA, SON!

I wish all of you a Happy Father’s Day!

Gluten-free info: Your sources of choice

Above all, I’d like to thank those of you who participated in the last Custom Choice Cereal 3-second-poll. The newest 3-second-poll is already up in the top left corner of this blog (that’s a hint)! Last time we asked

What is your primary source of information for gluten-free food options?

A total of 30 people participated in our 3-second-poll, and we are very thankful for your input. Hopefully we can increase the participation rate as we continue our polls because it is interesting for all of us. You can see from the results below that most of you rely on the internet and blogs to stay up to date on gluten-free foods and recipes that work for celiacs:

  • A whopping 73.3% (or 22 out of the total 30) said that blogs and the internet are the primary source of gluten-free information
  • 10.0% (3 of you) rely on industry or food magazines
  • 6.7% (2 each) look to either the GIG or the CSA or have some other source for their gluten-free updates
  • The academic route seems not to be preferred since no votes were casted for research institutions as a source of information

I like graphics and tables simply because I think they are easier to read than an bunch of text. So for those of you who are like me (and for myself), the results are also shown in the graph below:3-second-poll results
Chris and I would like to thank all you gluten-free bloggers, celiac organizations, and many gluten-free product manufacturers out there for doing a great job. This poll confirms your work is appreciated, so please keep it up!