A Taiwanese entrepreneur has had the opportunity to create nutritive to-go snacks using her keen experience as a semiconductor expert as she transcended a life choice to make a go for a healthier lifestyle.
Mandy Huang, the owner of Choice Delights Inc., has had this dream since she completed a culinary course at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and was awarded a patisserie certificate in Tokyo.
“This was a time when I thought of integrating the discipline of the semiconductor industry into the food business. I’m talking about the precise parameters that I have come up with to create a product that is healthy and tasty, which is difficult, nowadays, without putting extra ingredients that can be addictive or extra sweet that is common in most health snacks,” she said.
Huang previously worked as a director for a global semiconductor organization but has retained an independent director position in a Taiwanese semiconductor firm. From semiconductor to bakery, the shift was quite overwhelming, she said.
“Both as totally different, each with its own set of principles, but I was able to integrate the measurement principles and the manufacturing techniques used by semiconductor companies in baking,” she said.
“As a chef, I wanted to create nutritious food with the right crunch. But having the perfect crunch is as daunting as making a foundry or an electronics wafer. So I used my knowledge as a semiconductor expert to manipulate the parameters needed to create a perfectly-baked wafer cookies which is how they describe my product. To me, a snack with a good crunch is better tasting than a sticky, gooey bar, but that is my a chef’s perspective,” she said.
From superfoods like quinoa to healthy grains and fruits like Job’s tears, nuts, seeds, cranberry and oats, Choice Delights uses raw ingredients sourced only from eco-environmental farms.
Considered a high-end superfood, Choice has a standing partnership with Valrhona, a French premium chocolate manufacturer, to use its chocolate for one of the variants of Choice granola cookies.
Choice Delights uses only the finest materials for granola cookies, noting each ingredients characteristics and contributions to making the product as healthy it can get with a taste that is pleasant to the taste buds.
Market goals
While Choice Delights is now served at the business class lounge of Taiwan High Speed Rail, its presence in Taiwan was further boosted when China Airlines started offering rebates for Choice Delights products in Duty-Free shops upon presentation of a China Airlines boarding pass as it also serves the product to business compartment passengers.
Globally, Choice Delights products are now served at several Michelin restaurants as the product passed the exacting standards these ultra-fine dining restaurants traditionally call for.
The product is a resident sku at prime groceries and high-end snack bars in Taiwan as it is bit pricier than regular health bars.
Huang said she is keen to have her product penetrate markets in Asia like the Philippines and Japan.
The growing health trend in the Philippines is an attraction to superfood product manufacturers to bring over new health food trends, she said.
Gold award
Choice Delights has also won a string of awards like the Classical Red Dot Award Design for uniqueness and social corporate impact in 2017 and the Stevie Awards for Women In Business.
The citations are on top of the quality assurance label granted by the internationally-acclaimed Monde Selection, an international quality assurance test patterned after Belgium’s quality assessment protocol.
Monde Selection is an independent international quality institute, founded in 1961 and approved and controlled by the Belgian Ministry of Economy. While its hub is located in Brussels, it has reached the continents of Asia, Africa, Oceania and the South and Central Americas.
“Our mission is to certify the quality of consumer goods from all over the world to grant them an internationally renowned quality label. We are often times referred to as the Nobel Prize for food, although is not a competition. We only subject products to an evaluation using certain criteria when and if the producer wants his product to be tested,” said Monde Selection managing director Dimitri Delloye.
Since 1961, Monde Selection has assessed nearly 6,000 companies worldwide with almost 30,000 product tested and evaluated by Minde Selection juries.
Delloye said it pays to be evaluated by an international quality certification body not only because of the fame it will accord the product but also because consumers will be consoled by the fact that what they are consuming is of superior quality without untoward effects to the human body.
