Healthy veggie snacks emerge from mountains

BAGUIO CITY, Philippines—Three housewives, who participated in an annual street fair here recently, found they had something in common despite the fact that their homes are separated by vast mountains.

Each of them has profited from the wide array of vegetables planted in their backyards.

Theresa Angadol and Juanita Perez, both from Rizal, Kalinga, and Dolores Osben, who lives in Buguias, Benguet, introduced the summer capital to vegetable snacks and noodles made of broccoli, carrots, squash, malunggay, saluyot and ampalaya.

Commerce for Angadol, 35, and Perez, 38, meant a way to pay mounting household expenses.

Angadol’s husband, Glober, has been deployed to Saudi Arabia. Perez and her husband Camilo are corn farmers, who work hard to keep their four children in school.

They underwent livelihood seminars hosted in 2009 by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) which taught how to produce the vegetable noodles.

But in their community, only Angadol and Perez seriously pursued the craft.

Angadol and Perez each saved up P10,000 to buy equipment. They turned their homes into factories, constantly experimenting with flavors to obtain the right amount of vegetable for the right amount of snacks.

The two tested their samples on their children, who loved their products.

“I complain to my kids that I could not sell anything anymore because they were [consuming all my products],” says Perez.

Angadol first offered her snacks to employees at the town hall, the local hospital and the schools.

“[Angadol and I] help each other. We have our own territories,” Perez says. “I deliver products to a hotel and a restaurant in Baguio as well as school canteens and stores in Kalinga. She (Angadol) has other customers, too.”

But while veggie snacks were an instant hit in Kalinga, it took some time before the villagers in Buguias got accustomed to the new product, according to Osben, who developed her own vegetable snack line in 2007 along with her husband, Agustin.

“At first, people did not appreciate veggie snacks because they are used to [brand-name snack products]. But we keep on innovating our products, improving on the mixture until the kids in our neighborhood enjoyed eating them,” she says.

The patience and constant innovation paid off. Osben has been supplying veggie snacks and noodles not only in her hometown but in nearby areas as well.

Osben says she retired from a government bank to invest her time in the business and to get better hours so she could raise her three children properly.

Benguet supplies most of the salad vegetables sold each day in Metro Manila, “so why not take advantage of the abundant vegetables in our province and do business?” she asks.

Agustin was trained by the Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI), a facility operated by the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), to make vegetable noodles.

The Osben couple then bought equipment and converted a room in their house into a small noodle factory.

Much like the Kalinga housewives, the Osben couple’s very first hits were the broccoli and carrot snacks that were consumed by their children.

“They almost finished what we had made. This was a welcome change since my children did not like eating vegetables. They [preferred to] eat processed food which was [not good] for their health,” Osben says.

She also notes a DTI feasibility study which shows that consumers are more attracted to products that are marketed for their nutritional value.