Fat free

La Chiva Snacks

Do you find yourself feeling guilty for all of the mindless snacking that you do? I know that here at The Amazing Blog we graze at our desks far too often. Hence, we’re on a neverending mission to find healthier alternatives to our usual choices. Enter La Chiva.

La Chiva was created by Ruth Willis who was born in Colombia and always missed her native fresh fruit and vegetables. Inspired by the flavours of her Colombia, she decided to create a healthy snack with light and crispy pieces of freeze-dried Colombian fruit. That’s it. No other ingredients are used to make La Chiva, where we breathed a sigh of relief, after reading this on the packaging. There’s no need to feel guilty about eating these either as each pack is gluten-free, virtually fat-free, vegan, no added sugars and best of all less than 40 calories! By freeze-drying the fruit at its ripest, La Chiva is able to deliver all the deliciousness of Colombian fruit with nothing added or taken away.

The brand’s name comes from the La Chiva buses, which is the only way to travel in the Colombian countryside. Since the brand is dependent on these buses to take their workers to the farms and their fresh fruit to market, they decided to name the brand after them. We tried all three varieties of La Chiva snacksStrawberry, Pineapple and Mango. Our favourite was the Pineapple flavour, which was a winner of the Great Taste Awards in 2017. While you can eat these alone, the other possibilities are endless, we added them to cereal and also sprinkled them on top of Greek yogurt. Each pack can count as one of the five daily servings of fruit. Plus, their vibrant packaging brings a little ray of sunshine into our UK grey and rainy days.

Want to taste the goodness of Colombian grown fruit for yourself? The La Chiva Freeze Dried snacks can be purchased here. A box of 12 bags retails for £9.00 (7g bags for the strawberry and 10g bags for pineapple and mango) while an individual bag retails for £0.89.

Iced tea you ask?

Here at the Amazing PR office we’ve become hooked on Daymer Bay Iced Tea. Iced tea you ask? Us Brits are well-known for our love of a hot cup of tea (and don’t get me wrong, I can't function until i've had at least one cup) but have never really embraced the cold version. However these refreshing  and fruity drinks from Daymer Bay are so delicious that we’ve even been known to crave a bottle so badly during these warm afternoons that we’ve sent members of the team on emergency iced tea runs!

Launched last year, this small Cornish company gets its name from the long, sandy beach in the north of the region popular with windsurfers. It comes in six flavours; four made from dark teas (pomegranate, mango, peach and lemon) and two green tea versions (apple and elderflower) and here at Amazing we all have our own favourite – mine would have to be a toss up between the peach dark tea or the apple green tea version. Not only do they taste great, they contain 100% natural ingredients, are fat free and do not contain any added sugar, artificial sweeteners, additives or preservatives. The tea is sourced from plantations in Sri Lanka and the fruit is sourced from sustainable farms and responsible growers in the UK, Europe, Africa and Asia. It is then blended and bottled in the UK. The company also donates a penny for every bottle sold to a chosen Sri Lankan orphanage.

Unfortunately at the moment you can only get your hands on Daymer Bay Iced Teas at selected deli's, cafe's and stores (we’re just lucky that our local café stocks them) so for now I can only advise you to keep your eyes open as I’m sure they will hit the more mainstream supermarket's soon.

www.daymerbay.com