Maybe you have already noticed, maybe you have only tasted it, and maybe you had no idea that our pistachio cream Power Pistacchio won the prestigious Great Taste award this year. For us as the creators of the product, 2 Great Taste stars are something like Michelin Stars for restaurants. In the past we already won a star for almond cream, later for nougat, and now pistachio has done it for the unique combination of the taste of olive oil and pistachios with just the right pinch of coconut sugar. But how did it all begin, and what stands behind bringing a product to life from an idea all the way to an award and the first enquiry from the premium market of Dubai?
Last year my wife, my daughter and I were on a road trip in Italy, where I wanted to get even deeper into the local cuisine of Puglia and Tuscany and to meet in person the exceptional producers of award-winning olive oils. At the same time I had heard that there is a Zdenka who runs the travel agency Si Italy, and that she has Tuscany at her fingertips.
It all started on holiday in Tuscany over good food and a creative conversation
What is more, she had teamed up with Martin Záhumenský, who was and is a kind of Slovak Jamie Oliver for me. Martin is a chef by profession who really put in the hours abroad and worked his way up from kitchen assistant to some fairly significant awards in the UK. In any case, at home we decided that we wanted to meet them and experience a proper Tuscan stay with them.
The whole stay turned out really well, and we ended up at the closing lunch in the little town of Baddia e Possignano, freely chatting about food and products and creating. Martin and Zdenka were at one time at the start of the Pappa Mia project, where they began seasonally bringing selected Italian products and specialities to fans in Slovakia. Besides the fine and clean-ingredient Chianti wine from small honest winemakers, through to my favourite Coppa, all the way to an Italian sweet speciality: pistachio cream.
That one, surprisingly, sold like hot cakes, but when I tasted it and looked at the ingredients, I honestly was not thrilled. Sugar, sunflower oil, a few percent of pistachios, and essentially you could not even find the exact composition on the packaging. So I teased Martin that surely it must be possible to do it differently, and that we should come up with it and I would make it happen. Together we set higher standards and criteria: that we would use super-quality olive oil and sweeten it only gently, with no milk powder, lecithins or other unnecessary things. That like the best professional chefs we would rely on the quality and purity of the primary ingredients and on treating them gently…
When three gourmets tune an idea to “perfection”
So Martin and I together “created” three alternative recipes and visualised the possible final product. Next came my part of the job: production and tuning the recipe for the final quality and taste. I contacted our partner Karol Stýblo as a Maestro chocolatier and founder of Slovak production of premium Bean-to-Bar chocolate, Powerlogy creams and butters. For a month we tested these selected recipes and tuned the details, because the slightly bitter taste of real olive oil kept coming through. The cream was not bad, it was even quite tasty, but it was not it. It was not Great Taste material, and somehow I did not have the feeling I usually have with products, that this is something I can be proud of.
Then at home I took the samples and, just on a whim, tried adding a little cashew cream and taking out some sugar. And suddenly it hit me! Cashews are probably the sweetest and at the same time wonderfully oily nuts, and they completed the recipe perfectly. I immediately called Martin, thrilled, to say I had it, and we went into production with a suddenly completely clear head and a clear recipe for the final product. So the third gourmet, the production master Karol I mentioned, put his shoulder to it at the end and finally prepared the first batch of the new recipe, which won everyone over straight away in testing, and I already had that feeling that fulfils me most.
That feeling when you cook something unique and delicate that, when people taste it, is an experience for them. An experience of taste, of the moment, of the quality, and of that huge feeling that everything in it is clean and wholesome.
The first pistachio cream was made in a limited edition of 3 000 units, which sold out within 10 days
And not only that. From the moment the limited number of pistachio cream units sold out, unhappy customers kept getting in touch asking us to add the delicacy to our permanent range. But with special delicacies it is not that simple, and for a whole year at Powerlogy I worked on a stable supply of the selected ingredients for 100 % of the recipe and on the possibility of regular production while keeping the taste and quality.
As soon as we had it set up and tuned in production, we entered and sent a sample of Power Pistacchio to London to be judged in the Great Taste Awards 2018 food competition. Over 65 competition days, 500 judges, experts in food quality, assessed food products from all over the world in blind tests. That year only 37 % of the products entered managed to win an award. This is how we wanted to put the new recipe and product to the test at the highest world level.
Thankfully it worked out and we won our “Oscar”
In London we won 2 stars out of a maximum of three, which also opened the doors abroad for us, and we are now starting to deal with the first enquiries from the premium markets of London and Dubai. At the same time we spent about 2 months working intensively on tuning the design with Rudo Letko from Gobigname.sk. Rudo is precisely the person who at one point scrapped our logo entirely and initiated a complete change of the portfolio design, which we are gradually turning into reality, and we can see that it really matters a great deal.
So the first green variant became a gold one, underlining the premium feel and the ring of a product that is gold to us in its contents as well. This is the short version of the story of how an idea is turned into reality here, from a thought all the way to a world award. You will always find pistachio cream at its best price on our e-shop, along with our other Great Taste awarded products such as nougat or almond cream.
Quality needs time, and that is why it can sometimes take more than a year. Personally, though, I believe that with this premium product the story is only just beginning, which we can also feel from the feedback of the brand’s fans and of experts at trade fairs abroad. Most recently in Scandinavia, where once again we measured ourselves against world trends in functional foods and presented our vision of the future. But that is another article, which you can read on my blog here.
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