Greening of Food Packaging

Austin, TX, January 29, 2008 --(PR.com)-- Walk down the aisle of your favorite health food store and what do you see? Mostly a whole lot of food packaging garbage. No matter how healthy the food is for you, most name-brand manufactured food products are packaged in a combination of plastics, metal, or cardboard packaging that at best, is recyclable. IgnaFire Chocolates, a new company in Austin, Texas, now provides healthy chocolates in environmentally-friendly packaging.

People interested in both a healthy body and a healthy planet are increasingly paying attention to the full life cycle of their food choices, and also the packaging surrounding that food. These plastics, metals and cardboard required some of the earth's resources to produce and require even more resources to recycle. Glass packaging is better, as it is often re-usable for storing bulk food items.

However, IgnaFire Chocolates now boasts completely trash-less packaging for their full range of unprocessed chocolate products. "Recycling is virtuous, but our packaging has an even smaller footprint by being completely compostable," says Clara Serrano, founder of IgnaFire. Rather than print their logo on the beautiful glue-free boxes made of handmade paper, they leave the boxes intact so they can be used again and again, and in the end, the boxes are compostable. "All of our printed information, including ingredients list and nutrition facts, is printed on either dissolvable potato paper, which just washes down any kitchen sink, or the same tree-free paper that comprises our boxes." This paper is made from sustainably-harvested agave pulp. Surrounding the chocolate themselves is a custom food-worthy cellulose bag that composts in 45-60 days.

Also, their on-line business model allows for selling directly to any customer in the U.S., maximizing the prices they pay their cacao suppliers in Mexico as explained on their website: www.ignafire.com.

And the chocolates? IgnaFire chocolates are very strong flavored dark chocolates made from stone-ground cacao beans with no cacao butter removed or added. They avoid the extensive heating and industrial processing of most other chocolate, keeping all the healthful flavanols and antioxidants that occur naturally in the bean. According to Serrano, "They are so strong in flavor, that you really can't eat more than a few at a time," allowing true chocoholics to get their daily chocolate fix with a much smaller amount of sugar and fat.

IgnaFire Chocolates are available in both eating morsels and a ground powder for making hot chocolate. Each of these is available in one of four flavors: cacao, cinnamon, vanilla, and moka. Free samples are available from the website.

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