When we live in a world with smart phones, smart cars and smart TVs, doesn’t it make sense to make sure you’re getting smart nutrition too? National Cereal Day is celebrated annually on the 7th of March and this year we raise our spoons to pay tribute to our hero cereal, FUTURELIFE® Smart food™ which has been providing South African families with a smart breakfast choice for 11 years.
In order to appreciate our current breakfast advancements when it comes to nutrition, let’s look at the history of the breakfast cereal invention. It was during the Civil War that Americans were faced with an array of gastrointestinal problems as a result of a high consumption of meat. Due to its affordability, Americans would eat a large amount of meat at meal times, particularly breakfast. During the 1860s, reformers expressed their views of meat being both physically and spiritually unwholesome. In the end this resulted in the idea of breakfast being transformed forever in not only America, but around the world.
The transformation started off with nuggets made from dense bran. This bland tasting cereal was so hard that it had to be soaked overnight in order to soften it. Since this first manufactured breakfast cereal, numerous food companies have used the breakfast cereal concept to produce products made from a wide variety of ingredients and in the most creative shapes and delicious flavours.
Somewhere along the way it seems that some food companies have however lost the initial ideology of creating a breakfast cereal that is nutritionally complete and have instead capitalized on the idea of a breakfast cereal that compromises nutrition for taste in order to make a high profit margin.
At FUTURELIFE® we believe that we’ve stayed true to the initial breakfast cereal ideology and this is all thanks to our humble beginning. The journey of FUTURELIFE® began in 2008 primarily as a social project to help improve the lives of malnourished and disadvantaged people in sub-Saharan Africa. Our aim was to create the most nutritional product possible at the lowest cost and with total convenience. It had to have a great taste and could be enjoyed by just adding water (adding milk and/or sugar were optional). We believed the product should contain only the highest quality ingredients, even if it meant getting these from other parts of the world.
We established a research team made up of doctors and dieticians and it took them two years to develop a product that offered all these benefits. We decided to call it FUTURELIFE® because it was created specifically to give people the hope of a happy and healthy “future life”.
FUTURELIFE® proved so nutritious and popular with everyone who received it, that we decided to repackage it and market it to all South Africans.
The product now known as FUTURELIFE® Smart food™ offers complete nutrition with an internationally recommended blend of energy from carbohydrates, proteins and fats as well as 22 vitamins and minerals delivering 50% of your daily requirements for all vitamins and most minerals. It also contains additional functional ingredients including fibre, inulin (prebiotic) and MODUCARE® (a daily immune supplement).
One serving of FUTURELIFE® Smart food™ is the equivalent of:
In addition to its nutrition, FUTURELIFE® Smart food™ offers convenience in the form of 4 delicious flavours and it can be consumed as a meal, shake or smoothie by simply adding milk or water.
It truly is remarkable to look back and celebrate how far nutrition has advanced since the early invention of the breakfast cereal. We are also proud of our own history and the ‘smart food’ we contribute to the breakfast cereal isles around the country. Every day we receive hundreds of emails from people with their personal stories on how FUTURELIFE® has changed their lives. These people are from all walks of life- some are mothers who are happy in the knowledge that they are now providing their families with excellent nutrition, many are already fit athletes who find that FUTURELIFE® gives them the sustained energy they need for endurance events and others are diabetics, cancer survivors, people with multiple sclerosis, suffering from IBS or faced with other health challenges who have FUTURELIFE® to assist them in promoting a more balanced life.
So, what are you waiting for? Raise your spoon, shaker or glass filled with FUTURELIFE® Smart food™ to celebrate National Cereal Day and the advancements of our proudly South African company, FUTURELIFE®.
Author: Sonal Ratan RD (SA)
