ACTIVATED

Activation is a very simple process.  We ‘activate’ our seed and nuts, by soaking them overnight in cool filtered water followed by a thorough rinse.  Activating like this washes off enzyme inhibitors like phytic acid, and that makes seeds and nuts easier to digest. It also means your body is able to absorb more nutrition from our products. 

RAW

We get a lot of queries about raw.  How do we back up our claim to be raw?  What is our definition of raw?

At Kitz, we call our products 'raw' because we activate and then slowly dry our snacks at low temperatures, in practice this is below 57 degrees Celsius.  One has to remember the reason we do this.  We make (and eat!) raw food because it is more nutritious (heat has not broken down the vitamin content).  We eat raw because it is alkalizing, and most of us have too-acidic systems. We eat raw food because it aligns with our philosophy (living lightly, eating low on the food chain, going Paleo, whatever!)  We eat raw because cooking food creates free radicals and other cancer causing agents (we want to minimize that by eating raw as much as possible). We eat raw because if 'just feels right' and makes all our bodily processes work properly.  Lastly, we eat raw because of the taste!

No bought-in-the-store product will ever be as raw as a freshly-picked-from-the-garden salad (for instance). 

Trust me, it is difficult to carry a salad in your pocket (even for a short time).  We feel there is a place in the modern eaters' diet for our snacks.  Snacks are where most people 'fall' from their healthy eating habits.  We developed these products so that when the inevitable snack craving hit, there was something better to snack on!  Yes, our products are not 'salad raw', but they are as raw as can be for a product you can throw in your pack for a month.  We consider this a success.

One way we consider our process successful is by a simple test.  Is the finished product alive enough after our dehydration to germinate?  To us, this is part of the definition of raw, it is still living.  If the ingredients were treated kindly (not heated too much and still fresh) then they would germinate, wouldn't they?

They would still be 'living'. Like these Buckies we sprinkled in the back garden.  Just a regular bag from the shelf, thrown down in the garden, which germinated in a few days.  This was not a 'scientific' test.  They were a packet of our Buckies(dehydrated buckwheat) thrown down in the back garden in Kingscliff, NSW during June 2013.  To us, this is a very successful proof that our activating and dehydrating methods are successfully producing 'live, raw food'.

Germinating the Buckies was so fun, we decided to do more of our products (we like gardening too).  With that in mind, we crumpled a bag of our Savoury 4 Seed Crackers and sprinkled them in a plastic clamshell with topsoil in it.  Three days later, the seeds were germinating nicely as the pictures show.

Now, it is unlikely almonds or walnuts will germinate (due to the removal of their outer covering -their germ), and the seeds that get blended (chopped) in some of our products will not germinate either of course.  But the germination of any seed indicates to us that our methods and process are not harming the 'raw-ness' of our ingredients.  I challenge others to meet our threshold of 'live and raw'.  Does your food germinate when it is sprinkled in the garden?

There is room enough in the world for different definitions of raw. 

This is ours. You decide.