About Us
The story behind the crunch.
How CrunchCraft Started
A few years ago, my dad was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Rather than accept it as something to manage with medication for the rest of his life, he made a decision: he was going to change how he ate. He cut out the carbs, highly processed cereals, the stuff most of us don't think twice about. He got a continuous glucose meter to monitor blood sugar in real time. He experimented, he learned — and it worked. He reversed it. I was stunned. I had always heard diabetes had no cure, and yet I had just witnessed it cured... with food!
Watching that happen changed the way I looked at food. I started reading ingredient labels on everything, and what I found was alarming. Products marketed as "healthy" or "low-carb" were loaded with sugar alcohols, seed oils, and ingredient lists that read like chemistry homework. Breakfast cereals marked as "a good source of fiber" had only 3g of fiber and 42g of carbs. Even snacks like granola, and trail mix, which I always thought were healthy, were just vehicles for more sugar.
I wanted something I could eat every day and feel good about — something made with real food, not shortcuts. When I couldn't find it, I started making it myself. Nuts, seeds, spices, and dried fruit, clustered together with egg whites and baked in small batches. No added sugar, no artificial sweeteners, no sugar alcohols, no seed oils, no grains. Just whole ingredients that taste good and are actually good for you.
That's CrunchCraft. It started in my kitchen, and is now produced out of a commercial kitchen in Fort Worth, TX. Every batch is still made by hand, and every ingredient is still chosen with the same question in mind: will eating this regularly allow me to live a healthier, longer life?
Really, No Added Sugar?
You'll notice that most of our products are mildly sweetened, and that's by design. Despite having flavors like Raspberry White Chocolate, CrunchCraft is designed to be a healthy and satisfying snack, not a decadent dessert.
The sweeteners we approve:
Allulose
This is a naturally occurring sugar in sun-dried fruits such as dates, figs, and raisins.
It's about 70% as sweet as table sugar, but because of the molecular bond in Allulose, it does not spike blood sugar and has almost zero calories. As an added bonus, it does not feed the bacteria that cause cavities like sucrose does!
Stevia
We're well aware of the bitter aftertaste that stevia adds in many commercial products. The reason for that is they use far too much while trying to compete with the sweetness common in commercial snacks and protein bars.
The amount of stevia we use in each batch of CrunchCraft is measured in drops because a hint of sweetness is all you need.
Monkfruit
After careful research, we selected a chocolate brand that makes no-added-sugar chocolate. The chocolate has a fantastic nutrition profile and is sweetened with Monkfruit, rather than sugar alcohols or artificial sweeteners.
Monkfruit is about 200x more sweet than table sugar, but provides no calories or carbs.
Why not use other "healthy" sweeteners?
While it is often talked about as superfood, honey is still molecularly a sugar, and our bodies know it. While table sugar is 50% fructose and 50% glucose. Honey is 30% glucose and 40% fructose. This slightly lower sugar concentration may be beneficial, but its still sugar, and fructose has been linked to liver and metabolic diseases, so we avoid using honey in our products.
Coconut sugar is very similar in composition to table sugar. The reason it's often recommended as a "healthier" sugar alternative is that it contains a small amount of fiber, which slows your digestion so that any blood sugar spike will be more gradual. We prefer to avoid the spike altogether.
Erythritol, Sorbitol, Maltitol... Any ingredient that ends in "-itol" is going to be a sugar alcohol. These are super common in many grocery store keto and paleo options, and honestly, we hate that. It's one of the biggest reasons that we think CrunchCraft can do it better. Sugar alcohols are prone to sickly sweet aftertastes, and have their own potential health impacts, as well as digestive distress when consumed in excess.
Composed of mainly just sugar with a small amount of minerals and antioxidants, maple syrup is really not much healthier than table sugar. It has no fiber to slow digestion, and it's easy to eat a lot of it since it pours easily and we don't measure it.
Similar to coconut sugar, date sugar is still a digestible sugar and will spike your blood glucose. Since it's the entire dried fruit ground into a powder, some people consider it to be less refined than coconut sugar. It does also include some fiber, vitamins, and micronutrients.
Many "sugar free" recipes will use natural sugars from fruit such as mashed banana or applesauce in order to reduce added sugar in a recipe. Because it's natural, it's automatically good for you... right? Unfortunately, the sugars in fruits can still contribute to high blood sugar and insulin resistance.
So it's Nut & Seed Clusters?
Yes! We call them nut & seed clusters because that's exactly what's in them. Unlike traditional snacks that rely on grains or oats, our clusters are made from a carefully selected blend of nuts and seeds.
Our snacks are not only grain and gluten free, but also crafted to be extremely low in carbs per serving, and 100% free from added sugars and even limited on natural sugars that would spike your blood sugar levels. In fact, our recipes have only 1g of sugar per serving, and 5g or less net carbs.
Okay, then what is CrunchCraft?
Nuts
All of our recipes contain tree nuts such as walnuts, almonds, cashews, and pecans in varying amounts to create the flavor and texture combination we think is best suited to each recipe.
So, why nuts? Because nuts are powerhouses of nutrition, filled with fatty acid chains of different lengths, micronutrients like magnesium, selenium, potassium, and iron, fiber, protein, and did we mention great flavor and crunch?
Seeds
All of our recipes have a few core seeds, which are there for health as much as texture. That includes chia and flax, which are omega-3 powerhouses, as well as sunflower seeds, which are among the highest in protein of any nuts or seeds, and packed with micronutrients such as Potassium, Zinc, Copper, Folate, Riboflavin, and Iron.
Coconut
Crispy and a little sweet, coconut makes an appearance in many of our recipes, and is the star of the show in our Piña Colada Small Batch Nut & Seed Clusters, with an accompaniment of dried pineapple bits.
Coconut has essential medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs), which are good for your brain, fiber, and antioxidants.
Dried or Freeze-Dried Fruit
The right selection of fruit to compliment the ingredients in a batch of nut & seed clusters is -- sometimes literally -- like the cherry on top. A little burst of raspberry or a crisp bite of apple is exactly what we needed to bring that extra oomph to each of our flavors.
However, fruit contains sugar too, so we carefully limit the amount of dried fruit in each recipe for optimal flavor while maintaining 1g or less of sugar per serving. Above all else, CrunchCraft is designed to be a snack you don't have to feel guilty about eating.
Spices
We go beyond typical snacks by adding house-made spice blends to every batch -- cinnamon, vanilla, cardamom, and nutmeg, for example.
Each spice blend is made in-house and trialed until the flavor blends perfectly with the other components in each recipe. Just wait until we start experimenting with savory flavors!
Carefully Selected Coatings
Like the fruit, these coatings are carefully selected to maintain the guilt-free aspect of CrunchCraft crunching, while complimenting the flavor of the roasted nuts and seeds and the spice blends we add to them.
A few of the coatings we use are hand-crafted Allulose caramel, no-added-sugar white chocolate drizzle, and a blend of spices and coconut oil that can be drizzled into the mix before baking to enhance the roasted texture and flavor.
Beyond the Product
CrunchCraft is about more than what's in the bag. We support organizations fighting food waste, advancing nutrition science, and helping people reverse chronic disease.