Black Olive Tapenade and Dip by Elki

How do We Keep Our Prices so Low? Offering our customers reasonably priced products is very important to us. We've built our company around a mandate of making our foods affordable.

About Serving Sizes Federal law sets serving sizes. Hungry kids and hardworking adults usually require more than a single serving. In our experience, two servings per person are required for each meal. To accommodate typical appetites, we produce larger packages than typically found in the grocery store. We focus on families-hungry families like yours. So we size our products to make large batches or to fill family-sized baking pans--typically 9 x 13-inch pans not the 9 x 9-inch pans that grocery store desserts are often designed for.

Freshness Counts Fresher food is better food. All foods deteriorate with age including dried foods, frozen foods, and canned foods. Food quality is affected by the freshness of the component ingredients, how long the product sat in the producer's warehouse and in the jobbers' and distributors' warehouses, how long it was in transit, and how long it sat on your grocer's shelf. It's hard to buy truly fresh food.
We want you to have the freshest food possible. We buy only the freshest ingredients possible and whenever we can, we purchase from the producer, not a middleman. We use a sophisticated JIT (just in time) inventory system so that we have minimal stocks of ingredients or inventory on hand and can use them or ship them quickly. And of course, we use superior packaging. It all adds up to being fresher food, better food.

Why We Don't Include Oil or Butter in Our Mixes We want our products to last as long as possible and be as fresh as possible. Oils tend to get rancid and not last as long as dried ingredients. So we let you, the user, add the oil or butter to assure that the food that you eat is as fresh and wholesome as possible. We suggest that you put some butter in the freezer and some vegetable oil in the pantry and rotate them often.

What About Eggs? Eggs are important for nutritional reasons. They supply essential vitamins and protein. Most grocery store mixes require fresh eggs but in an emergency, you may not have fresh eggs. That's why we include dried whole eggs in our products.