Wendell Turner is no newcomer to the food service business, starting in 1981 in supplies and equipment and, later, as a packager and distributor of foods. In 1990, he discovered a gap in the ethnic foods arena and founded Heritage Fare, a successful, Atlanta-based packager and distributor of down-home Southern cooking.
Despite his previous successes, Turner was always looking for more volume.
"That's what led us to the Garrett Morgan program through NASA," he says. And that's how Cleveland-based HF Food Technologies was born.
The NASA program, which helps small businesses identify new technologies for commercialization, alerted him to a US Department of Agriculture-developed product that replaces existing fats with a substitute called Fantesk -- a mixture of starch, water, and one or more oily substances.
The value? The substitute can replace unhealthy fats in meats, pastries and other foods while preserving flavor, mouthfeel and reducing fat for consumers.
Now licensed by Turner's HF Food Technologies under the name Nutrigras, the substitute has made its way into the marketplace. Assisted with an initial $250,000 investment from JumpStart, HF Food Technologies is working "primarily with beef, pork and more recently bakery products," Turner says.
"If you could take a ground sirloin steak, you could take 15 percent of the meat block out and replace it with 15 percent of the Nutrigras," Turner explains. "And in bakery products, we've shown reductions of up to 80 percent in butterfat."
Turner, who is CEO of both HF Food Technologies and Heritage Fare, says the product is being sold through distributors and "we have a number of restaurants that are using the product. And we just received one of the most important certifications for us -- the Ohio Department of Agriculture."
HF Food Technologies is located in mid-town Cleveland, was formed in 2005 and currently has five employees.
Source: Wendell Turner, HF Food Technologies
Writer: Gene Monteith