About Us
Zero Guilt® products are the results of a Hungarian innovation
The goal that our development team has achieved is not less than a type of pastry that everyoune can consume without feeling guilty, because of its unique ingredients.
The idea of putting vegetables into the dough is not new. However, the idea that the vegetable content should be much more than a couple of percents of dried vegetable powder, and to achieve it by adding actual vegetable puree to make more than 50% of the dough vegetable, well, that is an innovative idea indeed.
In order to make it applicable for the majority of diets, we needed to achieve several additional conditions, like
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it mustn't contain any types of cereal and added starch
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it must be free from all known allergenics
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it mustn't contain sugar and yeast
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it mustn't contain lectin
This last one might be an unknown ingredient for many, but it can be the cause of various digestion and other symptoms, nevertheless. (If you're interested, you can read about lectin here.)
The most important expectation, however, was that it must be tasty!
International Prize for Innovation
Health Food Category
1st Place
EIT Health InnoStars and iLex Group Hungary, with the support of the Budapest Chamber of Commerce and Industry, specifically sought out entrepreneurs with innovations in the field of healthcare to compete in the competition. In this circle, alongside a smart pen for post-stroke rehabilitation and a needle-free drug delivery system, prevention also rightly found its place in the form of healthy eating.
EIT is the abbreviation for the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, one branch of which embraces healthcare innovations, helps access resources, and find foreign partners.
The iLex Group is a legal innovation development and artificial intelligence research group that also places great emphasis on supporting Hungarian innovative companies.
The applications were evaluated by a nine-member jury of Hungarian and international experts, chaired by Hans Hofstraat, former Vice President of Innovation at Philips Research. Other notable members of the jury included Ferenc Dietz, president of Gábor Dénes University; Bertalan Jászkuti, CEO of Syreon Research Institute; Ákos Csókay, secretary general of the Budapest Chamber of Commerce and Industry; and Tamás Bábel, biotechnology expert.
We are very proud of our products and would like to thank the jury for their recognition. We will continue to work hard to provide high-quality products to as many people as possible who follow a healthy lifestyle or have special dietary requirements.
But who am I, and why do I have these wild ideas?
I spent my childhood in the 80s, and it is safe to say that I was raised on antibiotics. I was ill pretty often and back then they didn't know, or they didn't tell my mother that the antibiotics also kill the beneficial bacilli besides the bad ones and this would ruin my intestinal flora as a side-effect.
Because of the digestion problems that occurred more and more frequenty and became constant eventually, I was continuously looking for the healthy diets, and tried many of them to see which one was actually helping me.
By the way, my conclusion, based on years of experience, is that there are no one-size-fits-all type of solutions. Each person is different, and needs to figure out for oneself which one is beneficial.
Also, I understood and experienced that there are things that not beneficial for anyone or that are beneficial for everyone. Things like it is necessary to consume proper amount of water, and it is better to avoid sugars and processed food.
So, it is no surprise that with this mindset, I'm constantly searching for food that is tasty and healthy at the same time.
Pizza - not just "free-from", but also healthy!
Our first development was a pizza dough, an idea I found in South Africa. Since Africa is most often associated with hunger, it may come as a surprise to anyone who hasn't been there that you can get very good quality food.
Our first thought was to import from South Africa, but that didn't work. We then decided to make our own vegetable-based pizza dough, which will have even better parameters than the one we were considering to import.
Don Pepe immediately perceived our vision and embraced our innovation. They have been our best partner ever since. They accompanied us through a year and a half of work until the product idea became a finished product.
Then, when we were added to Don Pepe's online menu in the autumn of 2022, the genie was out of the bottle!
Even though we didn't advertise ourselves, more and more of you found us, and keep finding us, and your enthusiastic feedback and ideas continue to inspire us to create more and more delicious and healthy products. So the development never stops. More vegetables and new products are being created as we speak, because it's important to us to make life as easy as possible for people who want to eat gluten-free and healthy. And in most cases these two aspects are not even close to each other.
People often think that by choosing gluten-free bakery products instead of wheat flour products, they are doing their health a favour. But when you look at the ingredients in GM products in the shops, nothing could be further from the truth. It is enough to look at the starch content of these products. This is why I emphasize that Zero Guilt products are cereal and added starch free!
If you would like to read more about it, you can do so here.
You have to eat, even if you have to go!
We see it as our mission and we want to make a breakthrough, so that we who want to eat gluten-free, grain-free, sugar-free and possibly dairy-free and healthy when we leave home, have the same options as other people to buy something on the go that we're happy to eat.
Even if we don't want to go to a restaurant for a full lunch or dinner. We have very few opportunities to do that at the moment. We would like to contribute to raising this level of almost zero options to an acceptable level. Because you have to eat, even if you have to go!
