Photo via Instagram / Raw Ambition Foods
Brandon Roberts, founder of Raw Ambition Foods, began experimenting with raw, vegan food recipes eight years ago. His creations turned out good, but he felt there was still something missing.
“There’s a saying: ‘necessity is the mother of invention, but dissatisfaction is the father of invention.’ I was dissatisfied with the recipes I was making out of the cookbook,” Roberts says. He continued to play around with ingredients such as spirulina, a blue-green, nutrient dense alga, and created a dehydrated spirulina bar that he enjoyed.
Roberts made the bars for himself and for friends and family. He spent several years traveling and seeing the world before returning to UW-Milwaukee to complete his degree in community engagement and educational policy. It was there that he realized he could turn his bars into a business.
“My biology professor saw me snacking on a green bar. She asked what I was eating. I told her that I make my own spirulina bars,” he recalls. The professor tried the bar, loved it and asked Roberts if he could make some for her. He made a sheet pan of bars and brought them to school on the day of his final exam. “I gave her this sheet of spirulina bars, and she handed me a $20. I was surprised, but at that moment, I realized that I had a business.”
Growing a Healthy Community
Roberts’ spirulina bar contains flavorful, healthy ingredients such as fruits, raw nuts and seeds, and manna, a vegan coconut cream. For a binding agent, he makes his own chia eggs, which is a vegan substitute for eggs. Instead of baking the bars, they are dehydrated, which Roberts says preserves the integrity of the nutrients.
He will soon introduce another bar, the Raw Ambition bar, with bananas, raw honey, chia seeds, nuts, coconut and other raw, natural ingredients. He first made that bar several years ago. When his mother, Susie Roberts, of kalyANa organics gluten-free baking, had tried it, she suggested the name. Roberts also decided to use it as his company name.
As one who is very health conscious, Roberts believes that the year 2020 was a wakeup call for many people to take charge of their health. His spirulina bars pack a nutritional punch into snack form, making it convenient for people to eat healthy while on the go.
Like many entrepreneurs, Roberts wants to grow his business, but his main goal is to make nutritional foods accessible for everyone. “I dislike that health is attached to some kind of prestige, because everyone deserves access to healthy foods,” he affirms. “Through my background in nonprofit work, I hope to bring health to the community. I want to spark the same interest in health and wellness that had sparked me when I saw the raw foods cookbooks on my mom’s kitchen counter. Those are the moments that spring us into action.”
Roberts is in the process of setting up a website and ecommerce options for consumers to buy direct. In the meantime, look for Raw Ambition Foods at Bean & Barley, and at Thai-namite, in Wauwatosa, or connect with him through his Instagram account.
