Can’t face solid food in the morning? No time to cook a healthy, balanced meal? Not sure if you’re getting your nine servings of fruit and vegetable a day? Stricken by mid-afternoon cravings at work? Sure, nothing beats hot, home-cooked, unprocessed food eaten at the right time and in the right portions. But let’s face it, life, almost always, comes in the way.
Enter Relish, an easy way to get your nutritional fix, in a bottle. The brainchild of Ganesh Krishnan, his wife Sowmya and friend Vikram Chandrasekar, Relish home-delivers and retails a range of smoothies, nut milks and cold-pressed juices for the busy person who struggles to eat right.
“We lived abroad for 10 years and I wanted my kids to eat healthy so I would make smoothies at home for them. When I came back, I realised that this concept wasn’t there here, so I started doing smoothies — the healthy ones made with organic ingredients, without sugar (a few are sweetened with honey or dates) and preservatives,” says Ganesh, a former banker.
Adds Vikram, “I think it is hard to consistently eat a perfect plate — one that has a perfect balance of carbohydrates, proteins and fats.
Our smoothies are a great meal replacement as they manage to do that.”
The base ingredient of the smoothie is organic whole milk and bananas with other ingredients thrown in, depending on the flavour and requirements — nuts, seeds, seasonal fruits, whey, oatmeal, peanut butter, cottage cheese.
There is also an option for vegan consumers, where nut milk is used in place of whole.
Relish also has three flavours of almond milk — unsweetened, sweetened and with dark chocolate — and a cashew milk.
Talking about the range of cold-pressed juices, Ganesh says they are vegetable-based — “It is a bit like a multi-vitamin pill, only tastier. The juice is extracted in the same manner as cold-pressed oil is — maximum pressure and minimum heat ensures that the purity and nutritive value is conserved.”
The component ingredients of all the products are organic. Sowmya explains, “My kitchen has been organic for about eight years now and I wanted to apply the same principle to this product. We have several tie-ups with organic farms in the vicinity and source our produce from them.”
As the products are preservative-free, they spoil easily. They are hence home-delivered via subscription and need to be consumed within a couple of hours, says Vikram, handing me one called Go Nuts.
The smoothie, bursting with nuts and dry fruit in a banana-milk base, is dense, filling and delicious. A word of caution, while it is healthy — the base ingredients are calorie dense and portion size needs to be adhered to. A single 320 ml bottle, bursting with flavour, protein and good fat, packs around 400 calories. While a great meal replacement or post-workout snack, if it’s a meal supplement that you want, stick to the juices.
Taking into account that fructose (fruit-sugar) also causes an insulin spike, the juices are largely vegetable based with just a single fruit — gourd, cilantro, spinach, carrot, beetroot, and mint vie with pineapple, watermelon, coconut-water, sweet-lime, pomegranate and oranges. Despite the fruit and the seasoning mixed in, the slightly earthy taste of raw vegetable comes through.
To make things easier, the products are clearly labelled with the base ingredients, energy count and nutritive value. “We are trying to make it easy for someone to understand what they are consuming,” says Vikram.
The nut milks and the cold-pressed juices are available at the Gourmet Market and Amma Naana stores. Subscriptions are also available. Visit www.relishnutrition.co for more details.
