Lastly, Individuals Are Catching On to Medjool Dates—and This Model Noticed It Coming

When you’ve ever tried to seek out Medjool dates in a grocery retailer, you recognize it’s not all the time intuitive. You may verify close to the bananas, wander towards the baking aisle, or surrender and ask somebody. Till lately, date packaging not often did itself any favors: generic plastic clamshells, muted colours, minimal context. The fruit might have been candy, however it didn’t precisely appear like it.

That began to alter in 2019, when a line of brightly packaged, California-grown Medjool dates known as Joolies began displaying up in shops throughout the nation. You’ve in all probability seen them even when you don’t know the title: turquoise stand-up pouches stamped with a daring yellow solar, sitting up within the produce part. Joolies wasn’t simply attempting to promote dates—they had been attempting to rebrand them solely.

And it’s working. “We’re now in 6,000 to 7,000 doorways,” mentioned Amanda Sains, advertising director and founding group member at Joolies. “As a complete, the date class—us and our rivals—is up 33% yr over yr.”

So, Why Is Everybody Consuming Dates All of a Sudden?

I’ll admit, if somebody instructed me three years in the past that dates had been about to have their second, I’d’ve been confused. On the time, my psychological picture of a date was someplace between a prune and a fig, perhaps tucked into a vacation charcuterie board or hidden in a baked good. My household by no means purchased them, and I couldn’t have instructed you what they tasted like. Seems, I’d eaten them extra instances than I might depend, simply by no means on their very own. And seems, they’ve a variety of dietary advantages on high of tasting good.

Dates present up all over the place: in protein bars, smoothie bases, breakfast cookies. And but, lots of people nonetheless don’t know what they’re or what to do with them. These days, although, one thing’s modified. I’ve been seeing them throughout social media—drenched in chocolate, filled with peanut butter, whipped into caramel—and out of the blue, they’re much less of a thriller.

“They’ve all the time been sort of misunderstood,” Amanda defined to me. “They’re candy, scrumptious, and so good for you, however they’ve been caught in ugly packaging.”

That meant creating a model that was contemporary, playful, and a bit of sudden. However past the packaging, the group needed to alter how Individuals seen dates altogether, not simply as a baking ingredient or well being meals retailer oddity, however as an on a regular basis staple. They only had to determine how one can get individuals to note.

“If you journey to Morocco, Greece, the UK, even Australia, you understand how far more normalized date consumption is,” Amanda defined. “You’ll see them on the checkout counter or in bowls at individuals’s properties. Within the U.S., that simply hasn’t been the case.”

That hole is a part of what Joolies got down to shut. The corporate is an offshoot of La Quinta Date Growers, a family-owned farm in California’s Coachella Valley that’s been rising natural Medjool dates since 1979. Co-founder David Kohl runs the farm his grandfather began, and earlier than Joolies, their dates had been by no means bought on to shoppers. The concept to launch a standalone model got here when David teamed up with co-founder Greg Willsey, a CPG veteran with expertise at The Fantastic Firm (you recognize them from POM, pistachios, and Popchips). Collectively, they launched Joolies at Expo West in 2019 with the objective of creating dates simpler to seek out, eat, and perceive.

Amanda, who joined the founding group after years in digital advertising, remembers how robust it was to get individuals to see dates in a different way.

“We’d go into shops and suppose, What’s it about this fruit that’s so arduous for individuals to get?”

Are Dates Really That Good for You?

A number of it got here all the way down to seems to be. Dates are wrinkly. They’re brown. They’re not probably the most intuitive fruit to eat. However they’re additionally surprisingly candy—like, caramel-sweet—and filled with a shocking quantity of excellent stuff: fiber, calcium, iron, magnesium. And other people lastly seen.

They’re additionally shelf-stable, naturally energizing, and grown in a approach that’s much more sustainable than individuals understand.
On their thousand-acre farm, Joolies makes use of drip irrigation to preserve water and lets native vegetation and wildlife flourish to help biodiversity. Each Medjool date is hand-pollinated, hand-harvested, and hand-pitted. The fronds and trimmings from the date palms are was pure fertilizer. The pits are fed to cattle. And any fruit that doesn’t meet beauty requirements? It goes into their “Ugglies” line, will get reworked into date paste (in collaboration with their sister firm, Desert Valley Dates), or turns into a base for his or her candy snack line, Date Pops.

In brief, they’ve discovered how one can use 100% of their harvest.

“It’s a complete ecosystem,” Amanda mentioned. “Simply by consuming dates alone, you are serving to the surroundings.”

Now, if consuming six dates a day (as some individuals advocate for being pregnant wellness) feels inconceivable, you’ve in all probability already carried out it with out realizing. That very same date paste exhibits up in bars from RX, Lärabar, and different well being manufacturers. You’ll additionally discover it in smoothies, sauces, and baked items throughout TikTok.

At Food52, we’ve seen it utilized in every little thing from date brownies and occasional syrups to salads (instead of dried berries). My private favourite? A sliced date with a pat of excellent butter and flaky salt. Easy, however scrumptious.

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Regardless of having an array of date-flavored goodies now, Joolies’ bestselling product continues to be their basic: a pit-free pouch of Medjool dates. “Individuals love comfort,” Amanda laughed. “We’ve discovered that folks love simply having the ability to simply attain in and snack.”

However the advantages transcend straightforward snacking. Dates have lengthy been touted as a superfood for being pregnant—excessive in B nutritional vitamins, particularly folate, and believed to help smoother labor. One broadly cited examine from the Nationwide Library of Medication discovered that individuals who ate dates day by day of their closing month of being pregnant had shorter labors and wanted fewer medical interventions. Whether or not it’s anecdotal or organic, the proof is compelling—and in my deep-dive I did discover that it is backed by loads of passionate Reddit threads.

“I ate dates virtually daily for the final 4 weeks of my being pregnant, and I did have an incredibly fast supply,” one lady mentioned.

Dietary advantages apart, they’ve been a part of international meals tradition for hundreds of years, hailing from the Center Japanese and North African areas.

“It’s one of many oldest cultivated fruits,” Amanda mentioned. “It’s talked about within the Quran, the Bible. It has this unbelievable historical past.”

It additionally has a future. As extra individuals flip to plant-based snacking and rethink their sugar consumption, dates are completely positioned to rise. They’re nature’s sweet, sure—however they’re additionally versatile, nutrient-dense, and surprisingly sustainable. And if Amanda and the remainder of the Joolies group have their approach, they received’t simply be the fruit you discover in a bar. They’ll be entrance and heart in your pantry.

So the following time you see a field or pouch within the produce part? Seize it. You may simply get hooked.

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