Star Wares

BARS FLY: Mary Rakowski's StarBars were a hit at Penn. "They couldn't believe the chocolate I use is nondairy."
Photo By: Manuel Dominguez Jr

A new energy bar packs a tasty vegan punch, straight out of a Fairmount kitchen.

by Juliet Fletcher

Wherever she goes, Mary Rakowski likes to bring the energy. She brings it to her art, like the bright Plexiglas sculpture she's making to barter with her eye doctor. Onstage, with her band Dubrockez, she tears it up on bass guitar. And if her friends, colleagues and neighbors look like they could do with an energy boost, she's happy to sell 'em some of hers.

As a vegan, she likes to say she has "a hard time eating out in Philly;" so her kitchen perhaps became more of a laboratory than most. About a year ago, Rakowski found a way to make an energy bar, combining simple organic ingredients like fruit, oats and spelt flour. "I'd make them for myself to take to the gym," she notes — and when she'd play rock shows, she'd bring a stash too, to eat or sell to the curious.

Fast-forward to the present, where Rakowski's kitchen operation now supplies some of the city's favorite coffee shops — such as her Fairmount neighborhood salon Mugshots, and the steadfastly green Joe Coffee. All that would be remarkable enough, but the rise of the now-christened StarBars (the name's registered with the state), demonstrates a cooperation between a local producer and one of the largest commercial food suppliers in the country.

Earlier this year, Rakowski was contacted by an associate of Tim Zintz, the district executive chef for Aramark at the University of Pennsylvania. The invitation was simple: Aramark was getting ready to start a farm stand at Houston Market on the Penn campus, and wanted to consider StarBars as a product. Rakowski sent Zintz samples, and a partnership was born. Besides the farm stand, Zintz had begun working with a student group called Farm-Ecology on Campus to bring more locally produced foods to Penn, and he recognized that StarBars would "fit well" with that program. In late March, Rakowski was invited to the farm-stand launch, a buffet dinner. She brought as many bars as she could carry — 400 in total. And they sold. She was off: "The first order Houston Market placed was for four dozen bars. And the next day they doubled it!" Between April and late May, when classes ended, she was supplying 300 bars to Penn a week.

At the thought of an impressionable freshman choosing a locally produced, overtly healthy snack food to carry with his Nalgene, you start to wonder what's really in the bars. Rakowski laughs at the idea they contain anything addictive, but quickly admits that she's "almost addicted, very committed" to taking care of her body, through eating and exercise. But the secret to StarBars might just be a lesson to the better-known brands: Rakowski hopes (and from firsthand tasting this writer can concur) that they do not taste like health food. They're sweet, and soft — nothing like the desiccated wafers sold by health-food stores. And the alternative ingredients that give them vegan status also lend them a unique, noncommercial taste. That's not honey you're tasting, but nectar from the agave plant. "Nutty," one of the first flavors she made, isn't loaded with hardened lumps of nut, but baked with a home-ground nut flour — giving all of the flavor of the almonds, brazils, hazelnuts and pecans, with no husks. And skeptics might want to remember that the sweetest variety, "Chocolate Cherry," won over a whole campus. "They couldn't believe it," Rakowski giggles, "when I told them the chocolate I use is nondairy."

Business away from Penn has also risen: When she began, she would bake 36 weekly, and Mugshots, for example, would take a dozen. Now, she says, "Every shop I deliver to has upped its order in the past two months." But if rising demand would make other companies zoom out, go macro rather than micro, Rakowski's business plan remains the same: connect on a local level. She's a member of the Sustainable Business Network, allowing like-minded consumers and businesses to contact her through the organization's Web site about her product. She gets her peanut butter and oats from a customer-member of a fair trade coffee co-op. And in September she's moving her base of operations from the rented church kitchen she currently uses — not to a more distant, factory setting, but to the kitchen of her friends' forthcoming restaurant. Ida Mae's Bruncherie, at Tulip and Norris streets in Fishtown, to be owned and run by Marykate and Feargus McCaughey, and after hours it'll become Rakowski's experimentation lab. Next up for Rakowski: How about the Soywich, an orange-flavored cookie made with spelt flour and soy protein and with a soy chocolate ganache center that she debuted recently at the Punk Rock Flea Market?

In fact, the only significant change might be to the Starbar labels, to which Rakowski applies her Moore College training and designs herself. By the end of the summer, she hopes to print nutritional information on the front — so that customers will know they're healthy even if the taste deceives them. "I need to do that; it's just the next step to being serious about getting it into more markets." But it'll still be just her baking each batch, to keep quality on track. She sees that as her secret weapon over the machine-made brand rivals that she's beating handily. "Tim [Zintz] asked me, "Are you ready for this?' And I have to say, I am. If [business] doubles, it doubles. It's what I love to do."

StarBars cost $2 and are available at Mugshots, Joe Coffee, Balance Health Center, the organic farm stand at Reading Terminal and the farm stand at Penn's Houston Market. Visit www.starbarorganics.com for more information.