Why We Don’t Sugar Coat Anything… Especially Our Acai Bowls

We get a lot of customer questions about what goes into an acai bowl, so we felt it was necessary to set the record straight. Ensuring health and wellness to our playa babes and bros is our priority, and now, it’s time to dust away the sugar and hand over the facts. Without further ado, here is the Playa Perspective:

Recent studies show that many of our favorite certified healthy products contain just as much, if not more sugar than a decadent dessert! The average snack consumer tends to misunderstand the difference between healthy, natural sugar from the processed ones on any nutritional label.  It has become increasingly difficult to know exactly what you are eating, and it’s time to reverse this unfortunate commonality.

When competitors noticed our success and started entering our marketplace, we knew we needed to re-differentiate ourselves. Our super quick growth astonished and intrigued a great deal of people, and with that came a sea of helpful and not-so-helpful opinions on how to make us better.

To top it all off, the ordering system we used during this time required us to depend on a third party contractor to package our acai. We would have to store the acai for up to a year and trust this system to ship it to our stores all over the country. There was no quality control on our product, and shipping costs were outrageous.

Despite the constant opinions thrown at us, expensive and imperfect shipping process, and competition knocking on our doors, we challenged ourselves to continue exuding good vibes, opening new franchises, and intricately designing them to reflect our healthy lifestyle. But, we needed to re-establish that healthy lifestyle not only within our business dynamic, but also within our product.

That’s when we learned the most valuable lesson a business owner can gain: No one has time to sugar coat anything, ever.

And in 2016, Playa Acai was born.

Goodbye trucking fees and yearlong storage; hello 70% pulp created by yours truly.

You read that right — the acai we create *ourselves* comes straight from Brazil, is stored for 21 days maximum, and contains 70% of the berry’s pulp (aka the skin of the berry. Like wine, the acai you eat comes from the skin of the fruit).

That’s pretty incredible, compared to the 30-40% in any other company’s acai. So long, opinions and competition!

You’ve probably seen powderized acai and may be asking yourself, “why doesn’t Playa Bowls use acai powder instead?” Wouldn’t that make things easier?

When you powderize acai or any type of fruit, you essentially take away all of the nutritional benefits of that fruit, adding more of that bad sugar none of us want to consume. Would our product have a longer shelf life? Certainly. Would it sugar coat the ish out of our bowls? Definitely. Quality results in quantity, and that only happens when you remove the sugar coat from all aspects of your business — especially your product.

Because we have bypassed large trucking fees by making our own acai, this gives us the power to put money back into making our product as healthy and pure as it is today. Making our own acai from scratch also allows us the flexibility to modify our blends for seasons and add other healthy superfood ingredients like mint, ginger, goji berries, and even coffee. Our most recent special includes star fruit, which complements our pure acai quite well if we say so ourselves!

Now that we have taken you on our journey to bettering our product, feel free to click here to order a bowl and experience all the nutritional benefits of our acai. How’s that for removing the sugar coat?